Mother Tongue
How we all became institutionalized
Over the course of Grade 1, my daughter remained more or less the same person. To this day, she hates bees and wasps, still loves little dogs, is still immensely popular among her friends, still won’t sleep unless her bedroom door remains open to the hallway light, is still adept at filing away facts about obscure animals—the other day she explained to me what a gar is—and so on. Yet it is also true that something fairly radical happened between Kindergarten and Grade 1, and now nothing will ever be the same. In Kindergarten, which in Alberta only occupies half the day, the expectations were modest. Find your cubby, change out of your outdoor shoes, be nice to the other students, take your artwork home before it spills out of the thin drawer allotted to it, and so on. In Grade 1, by contrast, it beomes clear that your child has entered a system.
That system suddenly places expectations on the little person who, just a few winks ago it seems, was a suckling newborn. It becomes possible that your pride and joy might have math skills or reading skills below grade level. No matter that they’ve scarcely had more than a few dozen hours of compulsory instruction in these skills. The system tests children with an alarming frequency to see what they are lacking. Your bambino must prove herself to other people, which is a very different matter from basking in the glow of your unconditional love. At the end of Grade 1, as my daughter had managed to gain a plausible toehold on the ladder of academic achievement—demonstrable progress had been made and useful habits cultivated—we parents considered the future nervously. OK, we said, we’ll have to maintain these habits over the summer so that Grade 2 can go even better.
If you want to make sure your kid keeps up, the only thing to do is to roll up your sleeves and become an amateur tutor. You need to help drill your kid for the spelling tests, the math worksheets, and the reading worksheets. Without warning, you’ve found yourself with a new part-time job. This is in addition to helping with fundraising activities for the school and for the after-school care and the daycare. This is in addition to a morning or an afternoon or a full day spent volunteering to support a field trip. How about the parent council—would you like to join that? You become aware that you’ve become enmeshed in a system that has an inexhaustible appetite for human labour. The government is only funding a modest fraction of what the system needs.
This system only formally introduced itself when that morning school bell rang during the first week of September, ten months ago. Prior to that, I had fairly predictable political opinions about public education. The problem is that governments don’t fund the system properly and they’re constantly chiselling away at the edges with school voucher programs and support for private schools and half-baked education reform measures that set schools up to compete with each other, as if applying free market principles will somehow solve problems with a public service.
Now that I’ve seen it closer up, it’s the institutional character of public education that is starting to feel grinding: the notion that it’s somehow a good idea to place all the kids on a giant educational conveyor belt, where they will be whisked through a series of experiences, during which all of them are supposed to exhibit approximately the same level of competence, and if they don’t—if they fall significantly short—the correct thing to do is to pull them aside, like luggage that was improperly packed, and give the deficit extra attention. Given the diversity of the students going into the system, it is strange that the ostensible goal is to promote uniformly high performance from the students coming out of it. This goal is impossible by design.
“I kept running up against the cultlike doctrine of endless positivity; my teaching was constrained by the insistent mantra that I always act as though every educational problem could be solved with a little determination. It struck me that this was ideology in its purest form...” Freddie deBoer, The Cult of Smart
The college admissions scandal of 2019—in which dozens of wealthy American parents conspired with education consultants, athletics coaches and postsecondary officials to buy their children's way into prestigious universities—reveals something rotten about the American obsession with education, and by extension, Canada’s. (I’ve seen Canadian parents try to game the system too.) “We use academic performance as shorthand for a person's overall human value,” deBoer writes. Adults name-drop their alma-maters to show where they stand in the social hierarchy. Tell someone you went to Oxford or Harvard and their eyes will gleam just a little more attentively in your presence. In Canada, Justin Trudeau, despite being a scion of the elite, was routinely mocked by his adversaries because prior to entering politics he was merely a drama teacher (albeit one who had attended McGill and UBC), while even conservatives seem to have a grudging respect for Mark Carney, whose Harvard degree and Goldman Sachs apprenticeship are unimpeachable.
The provocative thesis of deBoer’s book is that contemporary society has become unduly concerned with “between-group variation”—the apparent achievement gap between, say, poor inner city kids on one side and affluent suburban white kids on the other. Citing reams of credible research, deBoer argues that variation of ability is far more pronounced within groups. "In any such groups, you will find students who excel at the highest levels and students who fail again and again." In other words, your postal code or the colour of your skin or the amount of money in your parents’ investment portfolio matter significantly less in predicting academic achievement than the natural intellectual gifts you were born with.
This observation has significant public policy implications. Under the current education system—whether it’s in the United States or in Canada—the general expectation is that any gap in achievement between children or between groups of children should be bridged in some way: with more attention, with special programming, with more funding, etc. I have no doubt that there is some merit to this. I saw firsthand how the hallways were in my daughter’s school when all the educational assistants assigned to special needs kids were on strike. As the system is currently designed, these are crucial jobs. But what if we are mistaken in our determination to bring all kids up to the same imaginary achievement bar placed high above their heads? We are implying that all those who fall short will lead wasted lives. Insisting that everyone can and should achieve and that only effort and commitment count is unintentionally mean spirited. Consider the kind of mantras you hear repeated in Sesame Street. Simply believe in yourself, try and try again, and never give up. This approach does untold harm to society’s youngest. It imparts the lesson that there is no reason not to succeed. If kids don't succeed it is because either they, or their teachers, aren't trying hard enough.
“The rigid ideology of education, and particularly of the education 'reform' movement, was that there were no natural constraints on student growth—and that any suggestion that students had limits to their potential was an excuse ginned up by lazy teachers,” writes deBoer as he chronicles his long apprenticeship in the education system, both as a school teacher and through his master’s and PhD experience. The empirical data shows that the more rigorously the United States increased the overall level of educational attainment in society (progressively more high school grads, more bachelor’s degrees, and more graduate degrees) the more inequality increased. The great claim that education would drive up prosperity for everyone turned out to be false. (“The best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education,” claimed Barack Obama.) Postsecondary education in particular, it turns out, has been an engine of inequality.
There are thousands of young people, especially in North America’s biggest cities, armed with numerous postsecondary degrees and huge numbers of them will never adequately put all that education to use. Those with no postsecondary education usually suffer an even worse plight. Some on the right will scoff at the over-educated Starbucks barista and say they chose the wrong degree—say, drama. But the problem isn’t the drama degree. The problem is that the economy underproduces decent, well-paid jobs to people of diverse backgrounds. The pressure put on the education system and on the kids within that system has been entirely misplaced.
Freddie deBoer takes aim at the bi-partisan consensus that emerged in the United States between the George W. Bush administration and Obama’s that followed it. There was near-universal agreement that schools were failing and that the status quo was unacceptable. Schools should be opened up to all kinds of innovation and experimentation in search of excellence. Every child has near-infinite potential coiled up inside them, waiting to be unleashed. The results of this bi-partisan consensus were measures such as the federal No Child Left Behind legislation and Cory Booker’s disastrous decision to allow Facebook to spend $10 billion on school reform in Newark, and so on. None of these changes can really be said to have solved the broader societal problems they were designed to address.
Schools can’t be asked to solve inequality (bridge the achievement gap) while at the same time also sorting students into different ranks based on achievement. If a teacher is going to assign an A, it’s very likely she is also going to assign some C’s and D’s. The value of the A means nothing if every student gets one. The system cannot operate properly unless children fail.
DeBoer argues for a “loosening of standards.” He isn't saying that it should take a lower level of education to become a doctor or that an airline pilot should spend fewer hours learning their vocation. What he is objecting to is arbitrary standards of achievement being applied to vast swathes of young people with no concern for whether such standards are in their interest. Andrew Hacker's book, The Math Myth, helps make the case. Hacker has observed that in the United States, legions of students are struggling at algebra, falling behind their peers, leading many of them to drop out entirely. If rates of failure remain stubbornly high, as indeed has been the case, and yet passing math remains essential to moving on through high school and onward to university and college, administrators ultimately have little choice but to set the bar a little lower. Eroding the value of A’s and B’s by simply making it easier to earn them has been the preferred administrative solution to the problem of not enough students meeting the desired standard. But why go down this path? Why not, instead, maintain high standards for those who are gifted at math while simply ditching algebra as a requirement for the vast majority of youth who simply want to move on to high school completion? DeBoer suggests replacing algebra as a mainstream subject with more applied skills such as statistics or data management, giving students the chance to use Excel and other tools that are likely to be relevant to them as working adults. Is that waving the white flag of academic surrender or rather meeting students where they're at while sparing them the unnecessary ignominy of so-called failure?
DeBoer argues convincingly that public education will continue to fall short while it remains embedded in a social system designed to sort workers into a competitive social hierarchy. The reforms he proposes range from standard left-wing policy (eliminate charter schools, provide universal daycare and after-school care—not for educational reasons, but for the moral imperative of giving all children safe places to spend the day while their parents work); other proposals veer sharply away from conventional left-wing ideas. His most important suggestion is that we should abandon the rigid belief system that a postsecondary degree or diploma is essential for living a good life. “In contemporary society, we have more ways to be a loser than a winner,” DeBoer writes. Too many youth cannot imagine a viable future that does not take them first to high school graduation and beyond to higher education. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that whatever such pathways that existed were intentionally closed because it became ideologically untenable to allow them to exist. Deindustrialization pauperized millions of North Americans who would otherwise have been content and prosperous even with minimal schooling. Those left behind were offered the false hope of education. If they were unable to get ahead, it was their fault because they didn’t try enough.
Contemporary society has precious few examples of what success looks like outside of outright affluence. There is a reason Jeff Bridges’ character of The Dude in The Big Lebowski is so appealing. “Takin’ er easy for all us sinners,” is a subtle subversion of the way society actually works. It is even more subversive now in 2025 than it was during the slightly more chilled-out 1990s when the film was made. To find someone who is content to live in cheap rental accommodation and who delights in bowling with his friends while honouring a credible ethical framework for life (“the Dude abides”) is to have encountered a veritable revolutionary. When I first moved to Montreal in 2007, one of the things I loved about it was that cheap rent had permitted the existence of an usually large slacker class. You would meet people who worked at call centres or delivered flyers and yet still stood tall, defining themselves by being an amateur filmmaker or going to lots of music shows, and these slackers, despite their financial precarity, seemed to be enjoying life more than the vehicle-dependent and hard-working strivers of the Edmonton suburbs. The slacker way of life, alas, is over in Montreal too, now that the availability of cheap rent has dwindled to effectively zero.
“No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth,” writes Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society, published in 1971. The worldview of Illich has precious little overlap with deBoer’s, yet in decrying the elevation of our central “ritual” or “myth,” he comes closest to deBoer’s prevailing attitude, with its sustained attack on the “cult.” Look at what people worship—examine what is beyond purely logical explanation—and you will understand who those people are. Illich compares the initiation rites of public schooling to the power of the once almighty Catholic Church. “The modern state has assumed the duty of enforcing the judgment of its educators through well-meant truant officers and job requirements, much as did the Spanish kings who enforced the judgments of their theologians through the conquistadors and the Inquisition,” he writes. While the power of education to coerce individuals and to restructure society is church-like, it does not offer the promise of redemption in death. This is the promise God makes to everyone except those who cling to their wealth. On the face of it, education is less egalitarian than Christianity.
The effect of education is polarizing, ranking people and nations according to academic merit, and dividing society into "two realms," the realm of the academic and the realm of the non-academic. Skills that are acquired through formal schooling are preferred to those that are not, and schooling leads to higher status in our social hierarchy than skills that are self-taught or acquired at home or in the community. In defining learning as knowledge and skills acquired through school, we have downgraded traditional forms of learning, which were often even more complex. There once was a time when education was complementary to all the other instances of meaning-making and purposeful activity that occurred in a given community. Nowadays, education is it own domain entirely. You can precisely pinpoint where the schools are on the map; outside of those locations, there be monsters, so goes the prevailing ethos of the institutions. Yet, of course, learning can occur everywhere and anywhere.
For Illich, the content of what is taught in school matters less than the ritual of school itself. He is not the only theorist to focus on the “hidden curriculum,” which describes those attributes of schooling that are rarely openly stated but nonetheless present, just as solid as the school walls or the clock counting down the minutes to recess. The greatest achievement of the hidden curriculum, according to Illich, is the institutionalization of society’s central myth, along with its contradictions. Formal schooling is the initiation into the myth, similar to how the church-goer learns the difficult concepts of salvation in Christ and the transmutation of water into wine or the virgin birth. Yet by no means does Illich see initiation through public education as being just as good or valuable as initiation through the church. Formal education, he argues, is the most “all-encompassing” initiation rite the world has ever known. Consider that the church accepts that members of its congregation will forever remain sinners while secular education admits of no constraints to the limits to what can be achieved through education. Why, you can re-engineer entire societies!
Illich details the many myths imparted through the hidden curriculum. Here are some: 1) instruction produces learning, and more hours of instruction will lead to more learning; 2) learning requires defined subject matter which is further packaged into measurable units; 3) curriculum entails the discovery of “planned” meanings (you arrive at the exact same explanation for the origins of World War I as the curriculum drafters and teachers intended, rather like digging up a pot of gold that was waiting for you all along; 4) learning follows a linear curve of progress, and because curriculum and pedagogy can always be “improved” in some fashion, there will forever be the promise of something better (a revised and expanded textbook, a new pedagogical approach that produces learning so much more effectively than last year’s approach). Learning can go on forever. And so education, in its institutionalized form, is just like any other consumer commodity under capitalism. It is impossible to have too much of it. Those who don’t have enough look with envy at those who have more. Those who have under-consumed education are outflanked and outpaced by those who have consumed enough for mulitple lifetimes.
It was hard for me to read even a single page of Deschooling Society let alone entire chapters, namely because so much of my life has orbited the academy, which in my family was revered, and now it’s my turn, on the other side of this system, to watch—and try to help—my daughters navigate their way toward it. Not to mention that I am staunchly on the side of public school teachers, educational assistants, and school librarians when it comes to any battle with the ideological forces that seek to privatize the public realm, erode accessibility, and treat education as little more than a multi-lane highway toward employment. Nevertheless, I am more sympathetic to Illich’s argument than I would have been a year ago, chiefly because I can see how one of the main by-products of public education is, in fact, anxiety. When the main motivator for the student and parent alike is to keep up, it inevitably raises the spectre of falling behind. You can extol the joys of learning all you like but if you live in a society that has demonized those that lack a high school degree, you can stick that joy where the sun don’t shine. Joy won’t do you any practical good. The measurable side of education—the A’s and the B’s and the certificates and diplomas—exert a force equal to any law.
As a parent, I don’t like the notion that my daughters enter the system with deficits. They cannot read, they cannot do math, and hence they need hours and hours of instruction in order to attain the required level. Fuck off! My daughters are brilliant! They can read, they can do math, and they’re on the journey of discovering that potential inside themselves with help at home and school. This is how I prefer to see things. That doesn’t mean I would throw out the baby with the bathwater, as Illich would.
I think I would have quickly dispatched Deschooling Society into the waste paper basket, or more accurately, buried my PDF in the computer trash, were it not for the fact that I had encountered Illich’s writing about shadow work first and was hence inclined to show a little more respect for his ideas. In Shadow Work and Vernacular Values (almost identical books, simply organized differently), Illich covers broader territory and it is a little easier for a layperson like me to understand the unique worldview that in Deschooling Society compels him to propose the complete dismantling of public education as we know it. The Illich that grapples with the nature of work under capitalism seems less marked by his own particular era (Deschooling Society is absolutely the product of 1971, with references to the war in Vietnam and American ghettos and accelerated developed in Latin America), whereas the Illich of Shadow Work follows a long line of history which makes the ideas more universal and timeless.
On August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail from Palos de la Frontera, Spain, in search of a faster trading route to China, a voyage that was funded by Queen Isabella and her husband King Ferdinand, whose marriage had united the two realms of Spain and prepared the country to become an empire. According to Illich, the voyage of discovery of Columbus was only one of two world-changing events that occurred that year—indeed, that month. Fifteen days later, on August 18, the Gramática Castellana was printed on a press in Salamanca. The first and most consequential copy of this new book was given to Queen Isabella by its author, Elio Antonio de Nebrija. The six-page introduction to Nebrija’s Spanish language grammar addressed her directly, arguing that the book in her hands should become an essential tool in the strengthening of Spain’s nascent empire.
Nebrija wrote: “I have decided to transform Castilian into an artifact so that whatever shall be written henceforth in this language shall be of one standard tenor, one coinage that can outlast the times.” Nebrija openly expressed his envy of the power of Latin and Greek, languages of former empires, that had survived up to his own era with intact rules and structure, making it possible to pick up a book from antiquity and learn of Julius Caeser or Odysseus, while Nebrija’s own Castilian at that time lacked all structure and encompassed numerous local variants with no stabilized form. This state of affairs, lamented by Nebrija, meant there was no coherent vehicle to convey the aspirations of Queen Isabella’s emerging superpower to large numbers of people.
The implications of Nebrija’s grammar were quite clear. Henceforward, Castilian (what most of the world would now call Spanish) was a language to be learned through formal instruction, whereas previously, it was unthinkable that the vast majority of children would learn language in any other fashion outside of direct contact with their families and immediate community. Most of what they learned would, in fact, be from their mothers. This is the origin of the idiom mother tongue. Nebrija wanted to replace the people’s vernacular with instruction in language aided by a standardized rule-book. In this way, the natural dialect of the regions would be superseded by the formal and standardized Spanish spoken by the educated. Illich sees this as an attack on the very sources of sustenance that had given local communities power and meaning. Nowhere are indigenous languages mentioned by Illich but it seems apt to compare the standardization of Spanish in the late middle ages to the subsequent suppression of indigenous languages across the so-called “New World.” It is no accident that one of the main effects of colonization is to destroy the diversity of vernacular languages and to unite people under a standard language; this is the imposition of one vision of the so-called “good life” on everyone.
Illich holds the vernacular in high regard; in such high regard, in fact, that he argues for an expansion of the word vernacular to denote a much broader category of activity, taking it back to the meaning it had in antiquity, when it designated “any value that was homebred, homemade, derived from the commons, and that a person could protect and defend though he neither bought nor sold it on the market.” Language was once imbued with vernacular value from the beginning to the end of a person’s mortal life. A child was given not only the sustenance of her mother’s milk, but also her mother’s language, and this same language gave sustenance to other similar people residing in a particular place at a certain moment in time. These people enjoyed the use of that language with no need of schooling or rules laid down by the state. To give up all that was to lose a powerful connection with place and with others and to submit to a centralized authority.
Let us not forget that Nebrija, who Illich sees as an even more ardent imperialist than even Columbus (who was frankly too much of a blunderer for empire building), was not just concerned about spoken language. He was dismayed by the influence of the printing press, which had at that time reached a stage of development comparable to the internet today. “Your Majesty,” he wrote, “it has been my constant desire to see our nation become great, and to provide the men of my tongue with books worthy of their leisure. Presently, they waste their time on novels and fancy stories full of lies.”
There Nebrija gives the whole game away. The printing press had made it next to impossible for the state to suppress texts of which they didn’t approve. An old fashioned parchment would seldom have more than a few dozen copies—easy to hunt down and confiscate and destroy. Several hundred printed books were far more elusive; thousands of copies, utterly beyond reach. And so, at the exact time when language was everywhere proliferating and flourishing in its printed form, Nebrija, as Illich explains, proposes a “monopoly over an official and taught language.” Morever, “he proposes to suppress wild, untaught vernacular reading.” His goal was a language of one “coinage,” one “standard tenor.”
To focus unduly on the content of language would be a mistake, I think. Whether or not Spanish, or any other language, can be said to have adopted a “standard tenor” because of the enforcement of grammar and spelling would be to miss the more important question of how such efforts have been carried out. From Nebrija onward, ordinary language became the result of instruction—formal schooling. There is a word for those who don’t obtain this schooling. Illiterate. No one can be said to have obtained a credible mastery of Spanish, English, French and so on without having first passed through some kind of educational institution. Illich, ever the critic of development, sees this as a very dire turn in human history. This is the origin of our institutionalization en masse. “Taught mother tongue has established a radical monopoly over speech, just as transportation has over mobility or, more generally, commodity over vernacular values,” he writes.
The comparison with transportation is apt. Just as it’s next to impossible to travel the contemporary world without using a state-sanctioned transportation network, so too it has become impossible to partake in language without schooling. Illich laments the education monopoly, which has replaced human self-sufficiency and community power with large-scale systems that foster dependency and powerlessness. We have all been led down this pathway by design. I admit, I see no way back. We, the institutionalized, cannot be free until we bring these institutions under democratic control. Created for the building and maintenance of empire, democracy’s aim must be to redesign these systems—none of them more important than education—to promote human flourishing instead.
NOTES
The Substack Octopus will take an extended summer break.
Books
The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, Freddie deBoer, All Points Books, New York, 2019
Shadow Work, Ivan Illich. Marion Boyars Publishers. January 1981
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ivan-illich-shadow-work
Vernacular Values, Ivan Illich. Philosophica, 1980
https://web.archive.org/web/20160720033517/http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Vernacular.html
Images
Film still, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
https://walkerart.org/calendar/2008/one-flew-over-the-cuckoos-nest/
Sesame Street
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-39324183 \
Christopher Columbus
https://members.ancient-origins.net/articles/christopher-columbus-0