Maha,

I think we are conflating several different concepts here. Deschooling, unschooling, and homeschooling are three different things. Deschooling is not really about alternative education at all, but a critique of a core institution; unschooling is a refusal to “school” in any traditional way, while homeschooling covers a wide range of educational styles and practices organized by parents for their own children.

Most of your post is about homeschooling. I agree that this is usually just a replacement of state authority with some other type of adult authority.

In the context of critical and/or anarchist pedagogy, Illich’s ideas are very interesting. He does not say that all institutions are pernicious and often suggests alternatives which are usually small, distributed systems under the control of those who use them.

You mentioned health care as well. In another book, Medical Nemisis, Illich says that the medical profession is the single greatest threat to public health in our age. He refers to the US health care system of the 70s, but this hasn’t changed much since then. If anything, it has gotten worse. This thesis centers on the idea of a “sickness system” that is profit oriented and dedicated to maintaining illness as the dominant condition, reducing the majority of the population to the status of “patient” – drawing them under direct control of the medical profession. Again, this is easy to see in the US.

To understand Illich’s ideas, we might need to step back a little to see how power is exercised in society and how we tend to create institutions that disempower and ultimately enslave us. Once we understand this, we may be able to create alternative solutions that are more “convivial”, to use his term.