Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich
Published 1971 · 167 pages · 45,000 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Education & Reference, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Philosophy
How hard is Deschooling Society to read?
Deschooling Society scores 56 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 38 out of 100
- Philosophical and sociological vocabulary. Some neologisms.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- High-level institutional critique with few concrete examples.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Every paragraph contains a distinct argument.
- Narrative indirection: 80 out of 100
- Direct polemic. Thesis-driven throughout.
- Symbolic density: 20 out of 100
- School as symbol of all institutional dependency.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- The institution that claims to liberate actually enslaves.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Illich proposes learning webs as an alternative.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Seven chapters building a cumulative argument.
How Deschooling Society is regarded
Deschooling Society holds a literary regard score of 56 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.