From Scarcity to Abundance: Illich’s Educational Critique and Indigenous Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper takes as a beginning point Ivan Illich’s radical work on education and schooling, which began with his posting to Puerto Rico as vice-rector of the Catholic University at Ponce, in Puerto Rico, in 1956. This work continued with the Centre for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC), in Cuernavaca, Mexico, through the publication of Deschooling Society (1971) and beyond. Three distinct phases in Illich’s conceptualization of schooling and education are traced. For the purpose of this paper, I will term them de-mythologizing, radical scrutinizing, and re-tooling). In the third phase, Illich and his colleague Edward Reimer posited that what is actually needed in reconsidering education is to improve human interaction with the tool of education. This insight formed part of Illich’s 1973 book, Tools for Conviviality, in which he explored what such a project might look like. In this paper, this idea is pushed further. I offer some stories of Teme Augama Anishinaabe Elders from Turtle Island (North America) with whom I have worked for several years, along with my reflections, to suggest an altogether different view of learning and education, one which takes place in a context of abundance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.085 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".