In the course of thinking about the history of medical ideas, one figure from my prior work on the history of education has reappeared. His work, Deschooling Society (1971), is something of a standard in education foundations textbooks. About the problems of institutional schooling and the virtues of individualized education, the book and its author were easy to box up, intellectually, as products of their times. The notion of ‘deschooling’ made sense in relation to the long 1960s—in an era of Peoples Colleges, dropping out, countercultures, and anti-Establishment discourse. It was natural for someone, anyone, to call for de-institutionalizing education. Read more