Deschooling Society - Final Part.

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A good educational system should have three purposes:

  • it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives
  • empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn form them
  • furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known (p.75)


Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid. Their purpose must be to facilitate access for the learber: to allow him to look into the windows of the control room or the parliament, if he cannot get in by the door. (p.76)


We now need a name for those who value hope above expectations. We need a name for those who love people more than products, those who believe that

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.

Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.

We need a name for those who love the earth on which each can meet each other

And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity, 
obscurity is nothing uninteresting.

We need a name for 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 tend and care and wait upon the other, knowing that

to each his world is private
and in that world one excellent minute
And in that world one tragic minute
 These are private

I suggest that these hopeful brothers and sisters be called Epimethean Men. (p 115-6)

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