The Disappearance of Unmeasured Experience




A couple of quotes from Ivan Illich’s provocative Deschooling Society (originally published in 1971). Illich is radical and intense, and I tend to find more merit in his critiques than his solutions. But, the difficulty of implementing his suggested solutions only reinforces his point that “schooling” has penetrated all areas of society. Regarding the quote above, the attempts to quantify the unquantifiable have only increased as data and computing power has become more available to institutions and administrators (with little evidence, in my view, that increased measurement actually results in improved learning – if anything, the opposite is true, as time spent that could be spent in research, learning, teaching is spent providing and checking assessment data). Beyond the lost time and focus, there is, as Illich points out, a tendency to devalue that which can’t be measured. This is an attitude that increasingly pervades society outside of school and the workplace, seeping into our personal lives, even our spiritual lives (a church I once attended asked us all fill out what was essentially a marketing demographic survey). If something can’t be quantified, does it matter? Does it have value?