87 Deschooling physiotherapy

There are many ways we obstruct immanent and intense engagements with the physical therapies. Every time we try to identify what we experience; define it and try to explain it to others; build theories and concepts around it; construct models and frameworks to connect it with other experiences; decide some should control access to this special understanding, and so establish curricula, proper standards, rules, and codes of conduct; legislate to protect it; incorporate it into a grand global structure that harmonises everyone’s experience; and incentivise some to ensure the system is stable, we slowly bury the essence of the thing itself in layers of sediment. Western education systems have been powerful perpetrators of this, reminding us of the dangers of assuming that seemingly well-intentioned acts can ever be unproblematic and benign.

In his landmark 1971 book Deschooling society ^[1], Ivan Illich took issue with the prevailing post-war belief that the problems with education lay at the door of old-world authorities, like the church, the family, and the state, and that emancipatory education could be achieved by funnelling resources to poorer schools, and overturning longstanding power asymmetries. Illich believed that all such claims did little to really disrupt an education system that he believed had little reason to exist in the first place.

Over a series of books following Deschooling society ^[2][3][4][5], Illich argued that the main purpose of the education system was not to enlighten people, but to create and define the very needs it then claimed to address. In the case of Western education, the main reason for having schools was to produce experts, whose primary purpose was then to justify and support the very system that had produced them.

Illich believed that being taught to need and consume the services of experts had become a particularly important feature of education after 1900. For much of human history, society had been defined by mutuality, locality, immediacy, and satiety, and people developed interests in the world around them by pursuing their curiosity, engaging with others, and play ^[6]. Modern society had replaced these relatively autonomous acts of self-discovery with institutions through which people were increasingly compelled to move (a similar argument can be seen in Foucault’s notion of societies of control, see Chapter 6). Illich argued that we needed to be ‘educated’ through these institutions ‘Because being schooled, transported, entertained, etc., — consuming a service dispensed by someone licensed to provide it — is a radical novelty in the life of humankind’ (ibid).

Like Rancière’s Ignorant schoolmaster ^[7], Illich believed that the task of education was to bring entities closer to each other, and to remove all of the barriers and extrinsic impositions interposing between them. From our anthropocentric position, it is hard to see how people might experience the physical therapies without the layers of sludge we have built up around them over the years. But most physiotherapists also recognise how overwhelmed physiotherapy has become. College training programmes, for instance, can no longer cope with the demand for their programmes to produce students who are as capable as past practitioners, as well as being evidence-informed, culturally competent, interactively sophisticated, empathic, and academically rigorous. Perhaps unsurprisingly, teachers ‘are uncertain about how to educate students who are expected to know more, do more and, importantly, become more’ ^[8]. Our answer, thus far, has been to lay more and more sediment on to an essence we can now barely perceive. The time has surely come to look at ways people can engage in the physical therapies without needing to be schooled how to do so?