Discourses, unlike flora and fauna, are not protected by any "Endangered-Species Act." They can be mercilessly driven into extinction by forces that function according to laws which have no concern for the health of a discursive community. These forces are generated by the rules of discourse, rules that dictate what can and cannot be said on a given topic. The dominant rule governing what can and cannot be said on education is the messianic principle of discursive inclusion. According to this principle, in order for a discourse to be granted inclusion within the archive of education, it must construct the school as a pastoral institution capable of delivering the individual or society into some state of secular salvation. The messianic principle allows for discourses that critique the pastoral images enveloping the practices currently conducted within schools in the name of education, but those discourses must, in order to be considered legitimate, offer up their own pastoral image that would justify their alternative practices of schooling. These discourses enjoy at least a marginal existence within the archive. Few discourses, however, challenge the pastoral power of the school altogether. Those that do suffer exclusion from the archive and may eventually be driven into silence. This has clearly happened in the case of Ivan Illich. Unlike that of Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed was released contemporaneously with Deschooling Society, Illich's work has not stimulated the formation of an enduring and evolving school of thought in the field of educational theory.1 Nothing even remotely resembling an "Illichian tradition" within educational discourse currently exists. Further and, perhaps, more telling evidence of Illich's having been "silenced" is the fact that Deschooling Society is no longer available; it is officially listed by its publisher as "out of stock—indefinitely." While Illich remains active as an author, and while other of his works have remained in print, his discourse has all but completely faded from the community of education.2
In Silencing Ivan Illich: A Foucauldian Analysis of Intellectual Exclusion, I argue that Illich has been excluded from the archive of educational discourse because of his violation of the messianic principle that governs its discursive formations. While the scope of that work is limited to the forces exerted against Illich's discourse from within the realm of education, an argument could be made that Illich has been silenced, though to a lesser degree, in a far more general sense for having proffered serious challenges to the legitimacy of the Modern Project. Insofar as the logic of the school contains many of the cultural codes of that Project, "deschooling society" can be understood as a crucial "first principle" in the more general process of "de-Modernizing society." Because Illich contends that such a process offers humanity its only hope of putting a halt to the psychological, social, and biological degradation that threatens the existence of our planet, it becomes critical that educators rediscover his discourse. And it is against this background of an impending ecological disaster that I will reevaluate Illich's works, paying particular attention to the manner in which they proffer significant contributions to the discussion of the educational and cultural dimensions of the eco-crisis. Illich's writings reflect the characteristics of what I shall term a "postmodern environmentalism." Edith Wyschogrod's identification of six impulses of postmodern thought provides me with a useful heuristic through which to demonstrate how these characteristics are present in Illich's thought. The postmodern impulses that she identifies are: differentiality, materialism, alterity, empowerment, double-coding, and democratic eclecticism.3 As I describe how each of these six postmodern tendencies manifest themselves in Illich's writings, I will also discuss the significance that they hold for Illich's status as an environmentalist.

Differentiality and Materialism
Illich clearly demonstrates a tendency toward differentiality, a leaning that questions the modernist understanding of reason as a rational activity that produces truth, knowledge of the world unadulterated by contextual experience. Rather than taking an epistemological approach to the problem of reason, Illich expresses his differentiality by problematizing its modernist conceptualization at a material level. Moreover, in directing his attention to the ill-effects generated by the discourses surrounding the modernist conceptualization of reason as they have produced and reproduced those material practices and institutional arrangements responsible for both cultural and biological degradation, Illich displays the postmodern impulses of differentiality and materialism, concurrently. Institutions such as schools and discourse practices are mutually productive and reproductive, as Illich points out in his claim that
the school system today performs the threefold function common to powerful churches throughout history. It is simultaneously the repository of society's myth, the institutionalization of that myth's contradictions, and the locus of the ritual which reproduces and veils the disparities between myth and reality.4
What Illich refers to as "myth" is treated by C. A. Bowers as an "ideology" that "gives unity to the seemingly diverse patterns of thought and activity that make up life in a school."5 Bowers establishes the essential characteristics of the mindset of technological consciousness produced by this ideology as:
(1) A belief in the superiority of an "abstract-theoretical" mode of thought by which to understand experience "objectively";
(2) A tendency to divide experience into discrete, self-contained units that can be conceptually organized into systems;
(3) A proclivity toward viewing experience as a continuous occasion for instrumental problem solving and rational productive activities that can be judged on the basis of their efficiency;
(4) A belief that the results of instrumental problem solving and efficient rational activity represent progress; and
(5) A deferential attitude toward knowledge-producing experts as the paradigmatic bearers of the exulted abstract-theoretical mode of thought.6
With regard to this last characteristic of technological consciousness, Will Wright observes that "technological culture has developed a new and stunningly effective way of understanding natural phenomena, and concomitantly we have adopted scientists as the modern high priests of knowledge, as the men and women who can effectively control fundamental and unseen processes through the mastery of rather mysterious languages and rituals."7 According to Illich, the "idolatry of science" referred to by Bowers and Wright has contributed as heavily toward the degradation of the formal processes of social decision making as it has to the degradation of ecological processes. Bowers claims that "the conceptual foundations that supply the sense of meaning necessary for the individual's participation in the democratic process become increasingly supplanted by a reductionist mode of inquiry that recognizes only the objective plane of understanding and instrumental value."8 Illich's position parallels Bowers's; in his view, "political discussion is stunned by a delusion about science. This term has come to mean an institutional enterprise rather than a personal activity."9
As this citation from Illich suggests, he is not opposed to science. Rather, his discomfort stems from the idolatry of science and its concomitant centralization within various institutional settings where decisions determining the directions taken by scientific research and technological practice are made in a space that is far removed from the public sphere.
Within an Illichian framework, it would only seem fitting that a large percentage of scientific research is currently conducted in our nation's institutions of higher education. In his critique of schooling, Illich claims that school initiates individuals into the "myth of institutionalized values/the myth of unending consumption," a myth which perpetuates the view that "process inevitably produces something of value....Once we have learned to need school, all of our activities tend to take the shape of client relationships to other specialized institutions."10 Just as we have, in Illich's view, learned to become dependent on schools for education, and thereby confused process with substance, we have similarly become dependent upon scientists and other members of Modernity's professional clergy for knowledge. Because the knowledge handed down to individuals is presented as the product of scientific processes of inquiry, they feel obliged to recognize its inherent value as the product of those processes.
The professionalization of knowledge has created a secular priesthood that "holds power by concession from an elite whose interests it props up."11 It should come as no surprise, then, that the knowledge produced by scientists over the past fifty years, at least, reflects the interests of the power elite who concede power to their dutiful professionals. More specifically, the scientific research that receives the greatest amount of government-organized public subsidies is conducted in the areas of capital-intensive agriculture and high-tech industry (read: military technology), which, coincidentally, are the only two areas in which the United States is still dominant in the world marketplace.12
In Modernity, the idolatry of science and the formation of a professional elite serving the interests of the capitalist power elite has resulted in the establishment of what Illich refers to as a "radical monopoly" over reason. Illich would argue that it is an authentically human need to understand the world in which we live in order to make decisions about how to live in that world. Out of this need stems the authentically human value of knowledge. Fortunately, humanity is provided with an innate tool that allows for the production of that value (knowledge) in order meet the original need (to understand the world in which we live). This tool, of course, is reason. Illich states that
an individual relates her/himself in action to his society through the use of tools that s/he actively masters, or by which s/he is passively acted upon. To the degree that s/he masters her/his tools, s/he can invest the world with her/his meaning; to the degree that s/he is mastered by her/his tools, the shape of the tools determines her/his own self-image.13
The idolatry of science has pushed humanity beyond the point at which people are capable of exercising control over their tools. Having crossed this threshold, the value of knowledge has been institutionalized, taking on the material form of a packaged commodity to be consumed. Once accepted by individuals as a packaged value produced by science, knowledge assumes the characteristics of a commodity: official knowledge generated by reason qua institutional enterprise. As such, it must be predictable, planned for, and directed toward measurable goals. Therefore, its problem-solving efficacy will always remain limited to the industrial framework that it is created to maintain and expand. Like the products of the fashion industry, commodified knowledge is never complete, for there will always be newer packages to consume.14 In their addiction to this institutionalized value, individuals lose sight of the potential legitimacy of their own knowledge-producing activities; they become consumers of commodified packages delivered to them by science. In Illich's words, "they become dependent on having their knowledge produced for them. It leads to a paralysis of the moral and political imagination." And he identifies this paralysis as a "cognitive disorder" that
rests on the illusion that the knowledge of the individual citizen is of less value than the "knowledge" of science. The former is the opinion of individuals. It is merely subjective and is excluded from policies. The latter is "objective"—defined by science and promulgated by expert spokesmen. This objective knowledge is viewed as a commodity which can be refined, constantly improved, accumulated and fed into a process, now called "decision-making." This new mythology of governance by the manipulation of knowledge-stock inevitably erodes reliance on government by people.15
In keeping with his materialist brand of differentiality, Illich would stand in agreement with Paul Feyerabend's claim that the
idea of Reason (with a capital "R") or rationality...has a material and a formal variant. To be rational in the material sense means to avoid certain views and to accept others....To be rational in the formal sense again means to follow a certain procedure....We may surmise that the idea is a left over from times when important matters were run from a single centre, a king or a jealous god, supporting and giving authority to a single world view. And we may further surmise that Reason and Rationality are powers of a similar kind and are surrounded by the same aura as were gods, kings, tyrants and their merciless laws.16
Illich's differentiality, then, expresses itself in his critique of materialized reason made manifest in the packaged bundles of commodified knowledge generated and distributed by the scientific experts who hold a radical monopoly over reason. At one level, this radical monopoly has, as previously mentioned, allowed for the degradation of social decision-making processes. At another level, it has allowed for and continues to perpetuate the biological degradation that now threatens the existence of the planet. These twin degradations have been exacerbated by "the myth of self-perpetuating progress."17 Empirical reason presents the commodity that it produces (namely, knowledge) as capable of being constantly refined and improved, and thus of being accumulated indefinitely in the service of producing new technologies that will improve the quality of human life. Moreover, it reinforces its radical monopoly over reason by claiming that the progress of humanity is tied to the progress of science. Therefore, the mode of logic that is responsible for the twin degradations has been able to buttress its privileged position by offering packaged solutions to the problems that it produced. As Illich points out, however,
the use of science and technology constantly supports the industrial mode of production, and thereby crowds off the scene all tool shops for independent enterprise. But this is not the necessary result of new scientific discoveries or of their useful application. It is rather the result of a total prejudice in favor of the future expansion of the industrial mode of production. Research teams are organized to remedy minor inefficiencies that hold up the further growth of a specific production process. These planned discoveries are then heralded as costly breakthroughs in the interests of further public service.18
And he warns us against claims that "where science and technology have created problems, it is only more scientific understanding and better technology that can carry us past them. The cure for bad management is more management."19 In his estimation, such solutions will result in ecological sustainability becoming "the rationale for a bureaucratic Leviathan at the levers which regulate levels of human reproduction, expectation, production, and consumption," a rationale that Illich views as "founded only on a further development of the presently prevailing institutionalization of values."20 If we are to avoid an ecological holocaust, science, in Illich's view, must undergo a profound demythologization.
At the risk of sounding as if he were "antipeople...against economic progress...against liberal education...and against scientific and technological advance," Illich argues that "the only solution to the environmental crisis is the shared insight of people that they would be happier if they could work together and care for each other."21 Reflective of his commitment to conviviality, this insight introduces two other postmodern tendencies within Illich's writings—alterity and empowerment.

Alterity and Empowerment
Rejecting moral theory because of its dependence upon reason in developing some neo-Platonist conceptualization of "the good" to serve as a transcendental signified, Wyschogrod appeals to postmodernism's alterity as the basis of a postmodern ethic. Alterity refers to otherness, generally, the otherness of persons. For Wyschogrod, "ethics is the sphere of relations between 'self' and 'Other'....The other person opens the venue of ethics, the place where ethical existence occurs....This other, the touchstone of moral existence, is not a conceptual anchorage but a living force."22
Illich expresses his alterity in a number of ways at various points in his writings. In Tools for Conviviality, he posits conviviality as an "intrinsic ethical value" in which "individual freedom is realized in personal interdependence" characterized by "autonomous and creative discourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment."23 The strong sense of personal relatedness that the individual would develop toward others and the environment in a convivial society is also conditioned by another value identified by Illich that reinforces his alterity. In contrast to the rather Spartan qualities that have degraded its Aquinian meaning, Illich champions austerity as a value that places limits on personal enjoyments without excluding them. For Illich, the material culture realized in a convivial society would be checked from becoming distractive from or destructive of the mutually interdependent relationships that we share with each other and our environment if conditioned by austerity, which he identifies as the foundation of friendship. He expands on the notion of austerity in Toward a History of Needs, describing it as a "social virtue by which individuals would recognize and decide limits on the maximum amount of instrumented power that anyone may claim, both for his own satisfaction and in the service of others. This convivial austerity inspires a society to protect personal use-value against disabling enrichment."24 Moreover, conviviality can only be preserved if our private decisions and public decisions take into account the effects that they would render upon our social and ecological relationships.
Illich also expresses his alterity in the concluding chapter of Deschooling Society, where he proclaims a need to distinguish between hope and expectation. "Hope," he says, "means a trusting faith in the goodness of nature," while expectation means "reliance on results which are planned and controlled by man." He argues further that "hope centers desire on a person from whom we await a gift," while "expectation looks forward to satisfaction from a predictable process which will produce what we have the right to claim."25 Expectation, then, only serves to reinforce institutionalized values. Hope, on the other hand, is "Other" oriented, reinforcing the authentically human values of austerity and conviviality by naming both fellow humans and nature as "the Other" on whom we depend. Later in the same chapter, he claims that the survival of humanity depends upon the rediscovery of hope and the rebirth of Epimethean persons, those who "love people more than products...those who love the earth on which each can meet the other...those who collaborate with their Promethean brother in the lighting of the fire and the shaping of iron, but who do so to enhance their ability to care and wait upon the other."26
As it is given expression in such notions as conviviality, austerity, and hope, Illich's alterity ought not be confused with an altruism in which one loves others at the expense of oneself. Rather, Illich's view of alterity, as tied up in the notions just described, bears a strong resemblance to Matthew Fox's description of compassion. For Fox, "the entire insight upon which compassion is based is that the other is not other; and that I am not I."27 Similar sentiments are located in Illich's observations on the acquisition of a foreign language. For Illich, to learn a language means to learn its silences as well as its sounds. But to learn these silences, one must sit in silence oneself:
the silence of the pure listener; the silence through which the message of the other becomes "he in us," the silence of deep interest....It is the silence of the missioner who never understood the miracle of a foreigner whose listening is a greater testimony of love than that of another who speaks. The man who shows us that he knows the rhythm of our silence is much closer to us than one who thinks he knows how to speak.28
Fox adds that, "in loving others I am loving myself and indeed involved in my own best and biggest and fullest self-interest."29 Thus, alterity begets empowerment, the second of the two aforementioned strands of postmodernism tied up with Illich's vision of conviviality: "individual freedom realized in personal interdependence."30 The compassion of alterity induces not only the empowerment of the other for whom one is genuinely concerned, but also one's own empowerment. Under the conditions of conviviality, one recognizes that her own empowerment is contingent upon the empowerment of other human beings and nature as living forces.
That we should detect strong similarities between Fox's alterity and Illich's is hardly surprising. Both men are former members of the Catholic clergy, and they each were made to leave the clergy under pressure from the institutional church. For Wyschogrod, the lives of individuals who give expression to alterity, "in which compassion for the Other...is the primary trait...unfold in tension with institutional frameworks."31 Of course, Illich would have us distinguish between anticonvivial institutions that manipulate individuals into the impotence of an addiction to the institutionalized value commodities that they are taught to consume, and convivial institutions that foster individual empowerment through spontaneous creativity and mutual interdependence. Conviviality does not preclude the existence of institutions. However, the value of austerity limits the extent to which those institutions remove personal energy from personal control and, thereby, the extent to which institutions become debilitating for personal and ecological relationships.
As stated previously, Illich asserts that "the corruption of ordinary language," the "loss of respect for the formal process by which social decisions are made," and "the idolatry of science" stand as three interrelated obstacles to our growth into a convivial society. The idolatry of science has contributed to the loss of respect for social processes of decision making by establishing a radical monopoly over the processes that produce what counts as legitimate knowledge. This radical monopoly, of course, is responsible for the centralization of decision-making power in the hands of a class of expert managers who function on behalf of the manipulative institutions that they occupy in generating public demand for the industrial solutions that they direct toward industrially induced problems. Not only do these managers help to perpetuate the industrial institutions that they serve, they also contribute toward the continued centralization of decision-making power. As Feyerabend points out, political equality among the various racial and ethnic groups in liberal technocratic democracies has not meant "equality of traditions; it [has] meant equality of access to one particular tradition."32 That tradition, of course, has been the technico-rationalism promoted by the idolatry of science. Just as he favored the secularization of the clergy, Illich would undoubtedly concur with Feyerabend that science can and must be brought under the supervision of laypersons. Empowered to determine the scope and direction of scientific inquiry and technological development, lay persons would be able to develop knowledge and technologies to meet human needs without threatening either the equal distribution of justice within society or the balance between humanity and the eco-sphere. It is only under these conditions that a convivial society can be realized.

Double Coding and Democratic Eclecticism
Wyschogrod explains that the postmodern impulses of double coding and democratic eclecticism are mutually reinforcing. Citing Charles Jencks' writings on postmodern architecture, she points out that double coding is "'the combination of Modern techniques with something else,' whatever can communicate with a wide public."33 What made this move necessary in architecture was the sharp discontinuity that the products of Modern techniques created with the past and the concomitant failure of those products to communicate with a wide public. The call for "something else" to combine with Modern techniques in order to establish a continuity with the past and thereby communicate with a wide public opens up the possibility of democratic eclecticism to help guide postmodern techniques in their double coding.
The "something else" that Illich argues must be combined with Modern techniques in order to bring them under the control of a wide public and establish a continuity with the past is the sense of spiritual interconnectedness between all life forms that is communicated in his postmodern impulse toward alterity. Illich offers what amounts to a postmodern ethic that would effectively empower individuals to establish greater personal and collective control over the expenditure of human energies. In its spiritual character pointing to premodern origins, this postmodern ethic is also imbued with the power to reestablish the continuity with our past that was severed by Modernity.
As the basis of his postmodern ethic, Illich's spiritual alterity would have our actions reflect a desire continually to establish and reestablish a triple communion:
(1) communion with nature as "the Other";
(2) communion with those "Others" with whom we share our temporal and spatial existence; and
(3) communion with "the Other" within ourselves.
That he draws from an Aquinian understanding of austerity as the primary ethical principle to be observed by individuals and collectivities in formulating the means by which they seek to meet their needs establishes Illich as a philosophical conservative. Though he often adopts a vocabulary reflective of liberal individualism, the context in which he uses phrases like "autonomy," "freedom," and "personal control" mirrors a much more conservative personality. Conditioned by austerity, Illich's notions of autonomy, freedom, and personal control can only be exercised in communion with others; this communion must be "conserved." Moreover, his use of liberal metaphors alongside the conservative principle of austerity clearly reflects Illich's double coding. It is in this same principle that we can locate his commitment to democratic eclecticism.
For Illich, disestablishing the radical monopoly over reason produced by the idolatry of science requires the "demythologization of science," revealing it to be just one tradition among many and not necessarily superior to all others. As it has been exercised throughout Modernity, the authority assigned to empirical reason has overridden more traditional forms of cultural authority that, in many instances, sought to maintain the sort of communions previously described. For example, modernizing consciousness has contributed mightily toward uprooting the Gaia myth that established a spiritual bond between humanity and the planet by constituting the earth as a female parental figure upon whose nourishing qualities human existence depends. Similar configurations, of course, were developed in non-Western cultures. The destructive forces of modernizing consciousness that find expression in the voices of such technico-rationalists as Sir Francis Bacon, however, recognize nature only as a material resource to be exploited for material purposes. Myths such as that of Gaia are informed by modes of consciousness that are decidedly not Modern, but the arrogance of modernizing consciousness respects no authority other than the prerogatives of material conquest and industrial production for the sake of profits. For Illich, of course, the superiority of modernizing consciousness is itself a myth, a myth that must be revealed as such.
The demythologization of science opens up the space for a democratic eclecticism by demonstrating instrumental reason to be just one tradition among many from which individuals may choose in making the decisions that inform their actions. This does not, however, mean that Illich can be accused of pure relativism. Among the three forms of "communion" that the value of austerity promotes is the communion with "the Other" within ourselves. This communion acknowledges Illich's recognition of bonds of cultural authority, the past within the present that is us. Illich is also sensitive to the legitimacy of cultural authority. As a priest in a historically Irish parish in New York, he defended the culturally ingrained brand of Catholicism that characterized the expectations that Puerto Rican immigrants held toward the institutional church. The institutional church in North America recognized only one brand of Catholicism, its own. Naturally, then, it expected the Puerto Ricans to conform to its own institutional expectations. Illich defended the Puerto Ricans by arguing that the church ought to strive to meet their needs as Catholics, rather than expecting the Puerto Ricans to meet the demands of the church. In his missionary training institutes in Puerto Rico and Mexico, Illich taught missioners to be sensitive to and recognize the legitimacy of the cultural traditions of the populations that they were to serve. In his view, the church could not serve people by imposing institutional demands on them.34 We find a parallel, then, between Illich's rejection of a single, institutionally defined vision of what it means to function as a Catholic and his rejection of a single, institutionally defined vision of what it means to produce legitimate knowledge.
Illich's validation of cultural forms of authority can enable individuals to resist the persuasive arguments of those who might attempt to convince them that only one method exists for producing legitimate knowledge or one paradigm to follow in directing one's actions. The value of austerity that protects the communion that one enters into with "the Other" within oneself, however, does not legitimate uncritical conformity to cultural traditions. At some point those traditions may become destructive of the other two communions into which one enters; they may become problematic and need to be brought under a critical reevaluation. The differential impulse within Illich's thought can prevent a culture's traditional belief system from becoming crystallized as a reified reality. At the same time, his alterity can prevent those traditions from being nihilated, a process wherein all experiences, values, and ideas are held to be completely relative.35 It is at the juncture of these two postmodern tendencies that Illich's double coding and democratic eclecticism become functional.

Conclusions
Taken in combination, Illich's differentiality, materialism, alterity, empowerment, double coding, and democratic eclecticism may be viewed as constituent elements of a critical pragmatism that is at the center of his thought. Like Cleo Cherryholmes' description of critical pragmatism, the mode of inquiry that Illich presents as guiding the decision-making process in a convivial society
continually involves making epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic choices...and translating them into discourses-practices. Criticisms and judgements about good and bad, beautiful and ugly, and truth and falsity are made in the context of our communities and our attempts to build them anew. They are not decided by reference to universal norms that produce "definitive" and "objective" decisions.36
Critical pragmatic choices, however, must be informed by a recognition that the ecological degradation that we can experience in our daily lives stems from a degradation that has occurred within our cultural and spiritual existence. By itself, political revolution will not impede the assault on the environment, but merely place the same manipulative tools in different hands. In Illich's view, the political revolutionary wants to improve the quality and productivity of existing institutions along with the distribution of their products. She is guided by a mode of consciousness that bases a vision of what is desirable and possible on habits of consumption. For Illich, it is not a political revolution that will save the planet. Rather, he promotes a cultural revolution guided by individuals who recognize that the habits of consumption that the political revolutionary takes for granted have "radically distorted our view of what human beings can have and want."37
As deforestation and global warming continue to escalate, it becomes imperative that educators come to recognize the cultural dimensions of the ecological crisis. If Illich is right, any system of mandatory public schooling functions as one of the most important carriers of the cultural belief system underlying the processes responsible for biological degradation. After all, in his view, "school" is a product to be consumed, a commodity to which we have become increasingly addicted. While it is doubtful that he would approve of modifying the curriculum of our current educational delivery system, we do have the option of developing pedagogical materials and practices that reflect the same characteristics of postmodern environmentalism that I have just described as present in Illich's work.
For example, Illich's demonstrated tendencies toward alterity and empowerment reflect the same rejection of individualism that we see in the writings of C. A. Bowers. Our current educational discourses and practices advance individualism by emphasizing those forms of knowledge derived through context-free modes of thought. Student behaviors and outcomes need to be "objectively" measured and "efficiently" controlled. Cultural factors entering into those behaviors and outcomes are dismissed by the technocratic mindset as mere distractions that cloud the issues of accountability and achievement. This naïve understanding of the epistemological issues at stake in educational practice posits both the teacher and the student as culture-free individuals. On the one hand, the teacher is to step outside the sphere of culture to measure objectively the observable patterns of student behavior and proceed rationally to induce the proper outcomes. On the other hand, students are understood as acultural and ahistorical beings when only their observable behaviors in the classroom figure in the teacher's professional decision-making process. In other words, the teacher's labor is reduced to an assemblage of management techniques aimed at better predicting and controlling student behaviors, while students are reduced to things to be managed.
One Illichian solution this situation would require that the professional knowledge and practices of teachers embody the principle of alterity. Accordingly, students would come to be viewed as standing in relation to four "Others" who are not other. First, students stand in relation to previous generations who contributed toward developing the cultural forms and patterns that they have inherited and which have shaped their experiences of the world. While it is true that previous generations are "Other" in a temporal sense, preceding the existence of individual students, they are not "Other" insofar as their cultural understandings are passed on to individual students during socialization processes occurring within and beyond the walls of the school. Second, students stand in relation to their contemporary generation and to a variety of socio-political institutions. These "Others" may exist independently of individual students in a physical sense. In a cultural sense, however, to a greater or lesser degree, individuals share many of the same cultural patterns and assumptions as their peers and the institutions around them. Insofar as the individual's conceptual blueprint for experiencing the world corresponds to that of some peer, she has her experience validated. Her cultural orientation is reinforced by the similitude that she recognizes in the Other who is not other. Third, the individual is engaged in a similar relationship with nature. We live in nature, while nature lives in us. Recognizing this interdependency is, of course, crucial for resolving the environmental crisis. The same holds true for the fourth and final Other to which the individual student stands in relation. Future generations will receive from us the cultural patterns that we produce and reproduce. They will receive from us the interpersonal and socio-political relationships that we participate in creating and recreating, and they receive from us a relationship to nature. Moreover, the generations that have yet to be born can be viewed, in part, as inheriting a scene staged for them by us. Their world and their experiences in that world will reflect what we provide them by way of social, political, economic, and environmental relationships. In this sense, then, they are not us. But just as previous generations are reflected in us, we will be reflected in future generations. This recognition may help to give us pause before we act out of immediate personal gain, and cause us to strengthen the austerity identified by Illich as the foundation of friendship.
Taken together, these four relations to "Others who are not others" lead us toward a dramatic reformulation of the individual. They stimulate our awareness of the past and the future that live within us, as well as our awareness of the interdependency that we share with nature and the current social order. This four-fold alterity characterizing the individual provides fresh epistemological and moral soil upon which to construct convivial relations with each of the four Others. The ability of our current institutions of formal education to contribute toward the acknowledgment and growth of such relations would meet with strong skepticism from the Ivan Illich who wrote Deschooling Society. It is difficult to imagine, however, that he would oppose efforts to use the principle of alterity to inform the teacher's professional decision-making process.
Pedagogical decisions informed by the principle of alterity would help avert the further degradation of sustainable relationships that we are witnessing across biotic and socio-political environments. Such decisions support sustainability in a two-fold manner. First, in developing individuals' awareness of their connectedness to past, present, and future generations and to nature, they lay the foundations for an expanded sense of community. Second, they move us from viewing the individual as an autonomous and essentially competitive being to viewing the individual as an interdependent being whose actions and thoughts reverberate throughout a larger economy of relationships that includes and transcends one's immediate temporal and spatial boundaries. On both counts, alterity contributes toward developing individuals' sense of historical connectedness and moral responsibility to a broad range of "Others who are not other." In promoting individuals' sense of connectedness to previous generations, pedagogical decisions informed by this principle do not necessarily promote an uncritical acceptance of cultural traditions and a nostalgic veneration of those who contributed toward their formation. For example, John Locke's contributions to the ideology dominant within our current political economy ought not to be ignored. On the one hand, students should learn of Locke, his principle of utilitarian individualism, and the degree to which it has influenced the institutional order that we share with our contemporaries. On the other hand, they should also learn of the interests served by utilitarian individualism's ascent to hegemonic status, and the negative consequences it continues to have for our social and ecological relationships. Students, then, would be placed in the position of judging whether or not they believe that tradition ought to be preserved and passed on to future generations. Students form this judgment, if kept within the framework of alterity and empowerment, with an understanding of themselves as morally bound to the long-term sustainability of relationships in the eco-system and in the political economy. This is the background against which all judgments of this kind are made. Part of that background, because it involves issues of long-term sustainability, also includes future generations as a point of moral reference. From Illich's perspective, such a treatment of Locke would enrich students' understanding that economic growth does more than provide future generations with a more affluent lifestyle. When such growth is allowed to escalate without limits on the individual's pursuit of material self-interest, it presents our progeny with fouled air and water, and less opportunity for meaningful work.
Currently, the "human capital" movement within the U.S. Department of Labor grows increasingly brazen in its efforts to coerce the public mind into defining the function of education in terms of the projected demands of the labor market in the twenty-first century. They cite growing economic competition among rival nations, while the multinational corporations that dominate the political spheres in those same nations are promoting "free-trade agreements" aimed at managing competition and formalizing the already global economic system. The members of this movement perceive students as they always have: as future job-holders. Because the role of U.S. job holders in the global economy will require certain skills, those skills are being translated into the "outcomes" that U.S. schools are expected to induce in students and according to which teachers and schools will be assessed. This represents the system of "accountability" as it is currently being defined by the interests of an economic system that demands continued growth. Progress, for these interests, requires the preservation of the industrial model of ever-increasing production and consumption. As we move further into the postindustrial era, however, less human labor will need to be expended in order to guarantee these high levels of production. Therefore, with fewer high-income jobs available in the future, the question of how to maintain the required degree of consumption will become increasingly problematic for global managers. The disparity of income between rich and poor, and between developed nations and underdeveloped nations, continues to expand. More significant, however, the preservation of a growth-oriented economy will exacerbate the ecological crisis by placing increasing demands on biotic communities that, in many cases, are already on the threshold of collapse. More growth requires more raw materials from the environment and expels more waste materials into the environment.
In the final analysis, Ivan Illich continues to offer an effective critique of the cultural orientation underlying this economic system. As I have demonstrated in this paper, the basis of his critique possesses six characteristics of what I have termed an environmental postmodernism. These same six characteristics have the potential for serving as a basis for renegotiating central elements of our cultural orientation and, thereby, our educational practices. For example, the human capital movement views individuals almost solely as "human resources" to be engineered through schooling, a process also aimed at compelling persons to view themselves as competitive economic units who should be primarily concerned with achieving ever greater levels of personal wealth and affluence. The model for understanding the individual advanced here and in Illich's thought offers some important guideposts for renegotiating this view of the individual. Positing "individuals plus the communities to which they belong" (past, present, future, and natural communities) as the fundamental unit of the educational enterprise, environmental postmodernism holds promise as the basis of a radical new pedagogy that promotes sustainability across social and ecological relationships rather than personal affluence as the worthiest of human pursuits.
 
David A. Gabbard is an Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations at Eastern Montana College, 1500 North 30th Street, Billings, MT 59101-0298. His primary areas of scholarship are cultural studies and the philosophy of education.
1. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. M.B. Ramos (New York: Seabury Press, 1970); and Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 54.
 
2. For a detailed study of the silencing of Illich's discourse, see David A. Gabbard, Silencing Ivan Illich: A Foucauldian Analysis of Intellectual Exclusion (San Francisco: Austin and Winfield, 1993).
 
3. Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) xvi-xxii.
 
4. Illich, Deschooling Society, 54.
 
5. C. A. Bowers, "Ideological Continuities in Technicism, Liberalism, and Education," Teachers College Record 81, no. 3 (Spring 1980): 293.
 
6. Bowers, "Technicism, Liberalism, and Education," 303.
 
7. Will Wright, Wild Knowledge: Science, Language, and Social Life in a Fragile Environment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 23.
 
8. C.A. Bowers, Elements of a Post-Liberal Theory of Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1987), 26.
 
9. Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (San Francisco: Heyday Books, 1973), 85.
 
10. Illich, Deschooling Society, 55-56.
 
11. Ivan Illich, Toward a History of Needs (San Francisco: Heyday Books, 1977), 24.
 
12. See Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 81-82.
 
13. Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 21.
 
14. Ivan Illich, "The Breakdown of Schools: A Problem or a Symptom?" Interchange 2, no. 4 (1971), 7.
 
15. Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 86.
 
16. Paul Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason (New York: Verso Books, 1983), 10-11.
 
17. Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 60-62.
 
18. Ibid. 33.
 
19. Ibid., 8-9.
 
20. Ibid., 50.
 
21. Ibid.
 
22. Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism, xv, xxi.
 
23. Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 11.
 
24. Illich, Toward a History of Needs, 15.
 
25. Illich, Deschooling Society, 151-52.
 
26. Ibid, 166-67 (emphasis added).
 
27. Matthew Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1990), 33.
 
28. Ivan Illich, "The Eloquence of Silence," in Ivan Illich, Celebration of Awareness: A Call for Institutional Revolution (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 1970), 46-47.
 
29. Fox, Spirituality Named Compassion, 33.
 
30. Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 11.
 
31. Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism, 33.
 
32. Paul Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society (London: Verso, 1978), 76.
 
33. Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism, xvii.
 
34. See Ivan Illich, "Foreigners Not Yet Foreign," 29-40; "The Eloquence of Silence," 41-51; and "The Powerless Church," 95-106; in Celebration of Awareness.
 
35. For an informative discussion of the implications of nihilism for education, see Bowers, Elements of a Post-Liberal Theory.
 
36. Cleo Cherryholmes, Power and Criticism: Poststructural Investigations in Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988), 179.
 
37. Ivan Illich, "A Constitution for Cultural Revolution," 175-189; in Celebration of Awareness, 181.

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Referans: EDUCATIONAL THEORY / Spring 1994 / Volume 44 / Number 2
http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/Educational-Theory/Contents/44_2_Gabbard.asp