Illich’s critique of schooling targets the institutional confusion between learning and certified instruction. Modern education monopolizes legitimacy by converting knowledge into a scarce commodity delivered through compulsory sequences, professional authority and credentialled progression. The school therefore teaches dependence on institutions before it teaches any particular subject. Illich proposes learning webs: open networks connecting people, skills, resources and peers without requiring a centralized curriculum. The methodological operation is one of institutional inversion, asking whether an organization ostensibly created to satisfy a need has begun to reproduce the dependency it claims to solve. His argument extends beyond education toward medicine, transport and welfare, where professional systems may undermine autonomous capacity through excessive provision. Deschooling Society bridges radical pedagogy, institutional critique, network thinking and political ecology by defining freedom not as access to more institutional consumption but as the ability to construct convivial relations of learning.
