Illich (1971) believes that education has four functions
1. Education looks after kids during the day
2. Education supports pupils into job roles
3. Education passes on dominant values
4. Education helps people learn skills and knowledge
Illich agrees with functionalists about the functions of school- but he thinks the functions aren’t good enough. So we should give up on school as a bad idea.
The problem he believes is that schools don’t create equality or develop creativity. Illich wants to ‘de-school society’. He wants everyone to have access to education throughout their lives according to what they need.
Dewey
Dewey was opposed to rote learning, to pumping children full of knowledge. Instead, he wanted schools to operate enough like society so that children became interested in learning spontaneously, through a natural curiosity that led to their active involvement in the teaching-learning process. The teacher’s role is to provide the child with tools for learning.
Dewey’s motto was: ‘Teach the whole child.’ Math, for example, was taught through cooking and carpentry experience. The Dewey School was supported by the parents of its elite students and by gifts from wealthy Chicago families. Its enriched environment (23 teachers for only 140 students) provided ideal conditions for Dewey’s reformist ideas and launched the progressive movement in American education, which he led for several decades.
Dewey believed that the purpose of education is progress. While Dewey did not believe that children were little adults, he did believe that they should learn through democracy by engaging in learning that fostered the development of democratic citizens (Biesta, 2007). Many programs have adopted Dewey's philosophy of education in their pedagogical practices. The University of Chicago still pays tribute to Dewey's mission.
Criticisms of Functionalism
Evidence of differential