Reject amnesty, embrace uncertainty, and deschool society
Emily Oster's argument for amnesty illuminates the problems with certainty and blindly following anointed experts
“The claim that a liberal society can be founded on the modern school is paradoxical. The safeguards of individual freedom are all canceled in the dealings of a teacher with his pupil. When the schoolteacher fuses in his person the functions of judge, ideologue, and doctor, the fundamental style of society is perverted by the very process which should prepare for life.” - Ivan Illich
Emily Oster wants to declare a pandemic amnesty. She is requesting that we forgive and forget those who advocated extreme caution during the pandemic but turned out to be wrong in their assessments of threat and remedies. The most striking line in her Atlantic article making this request is her admission: "We didn't know." We, in this case, is Oster's family, but she is implying that those who advocated for measures such as lockdowns and vaccine mandates with imperfect evidence or little thought about the consequences were acting under conditions of uncertainty. To the contrary, the people she is declaring amnesty on behalf of were forceful in their certainty.
Those dictating lockdown policies and coercive measures to increase vaccine uptake didn't say "we don't know, but we think X, Y, Z might work." They used institutions to aggressively pursue restrictive and punitive policies because they were so sure they were right, many of whom are still digging in their heals. Their certainty wreaked havoc on small businesses, isolated children and teens, left the elderly to die alone, and led to job loss. Anyone who questioned lockdown policies, the origin of the virus, the effectiveness of masks and vaccines and their potential harms, or proposed alternative treatments were labeled conspiracy theorists, peddlers of disinformation, and locked out of social media accounts. Content creators who dared to ask questions or simply engage a variety of perspectives had their accounts demonetized or altogether removed, threatening their livelihood and access to, what in many cases turned out to be, accurate information.
Throughout this mayhem, all were supposed to unquestioningly nod their heads and comply. We were supposed to accept their certainty, despite the virus being novel and the human problem of fallibility. We were supposed to adopt a schooled mindset.
Ivan Illich, a 20th century critic of modern schooling, detailed the dangers of a schooled mindset in his 1971 book, Deschooling Society. He declared that one of the most effective outcomes of the school is that it teaches people to consume information from experts—i.e., teachers and those who have credentials granted by schools—thus productively initiating them into a schooled mindset. According to him, a schooled society has been taught that valuable learning is the result of attendance in a school; that the value of learning increases with the amount of input acquired in school; and that the value of such inputs is measured and documented by certificates.
Illich granted that family life, healthcare, and the media certainly play an important part in shaping one's worldview, but that schools, which claim to act out the principle function of teaching one how to form critical judgments, are the primary drivers of how individuals consume information and who they trust. If students learn to only consume information from those with public health credentials, for example, they will not question or challenge the claims of those deemed experts in that field. Furthermore, those with a schooled mindset will discredit anyone who does challenge or question such authorities by forming an opinion about public health issues if they don't have the proper credentials.
According to Illich, credentials create specialists, which are the only one's who understand the inner workings of their profession, so the schooled line of reasoning goes, thus non-specialists are discouraged from figuring out such things as how vaccines are manufactured, tested, and assessed for risks because they do not have the proper credentials. This delineation between the expert and nonexpert allows the former to hide behind their expertise and exist beyond evaluation.
When society is engineered, or schooled, in such a way, Illich argues, people don't need to be told their place in the world, they slot themselves into it and, in the process, put fellow citizens in their place as well through shame or ostracization. And those who do not understand their assigned place, or refuse to stay in it, get blamed for the world's ills.
Once this sort of hierarchy is created and accepted, according to Illich, individuals become easy prey for institutions and are more likely to accept the legitimacy of institutions and institutional planning. They are more likely to agree with the experts that institutions prop up—more so than other equally or more qualified individuals with a different perspective if those individuals are not granted the same authority by institutions.
Illich's remedy for a schooled mindset is to deschool society. In other words, he advocated dismantling the assumption that valuable knowledge is a commodity held by select groups of individuals and institutions and must be forced onto consumers. If society is not deschooled it will become increasingly dominated by totalitarian managers of information, he argued.
The regulation of information exchange by social media giants and governmental agencies on behalf of those who were certain in their approach to COVID, despite evidence to the contrary, is precisely what Illich was warning us about.
Twitter, Facebook, and Google took advantage of our schooled society to restrict what information was accessible to the public, not only during the pandemic, but also during the 2020 presidential election, often colluding with the government to make their censorship decisions. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, admitted that Facebook took actions to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story leading up to the 2020 presidential election under the advisement of the FBI, and they were instrumental in aligning their COVID fact-checking efforts with the mainstream institutional narrative.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been advancing efforts over the past 10 years to monitor what it deems misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. Never mind that what is considered disinformation today might wind up being true, as we've seen with much information about COVID. Efforts such as these to narrow the scope of permissible discourse in the public square will limit the public's ability to search for and discover truth.
Amnesty is not the answer, deschooling society is. Instead of forgiving the institutionally anointed experts for their wrongdoing and moving on without an apology, greater efforts at questioning experts and opening them and their actions to scrutiny by all should be pursued. Illich did not think that the school as it's currently structured was the mechanism to pursue such an endeavor, and although, perhaps naïvely, I haven't given up all hope that schools can be a place where the young learn to challenge ideas, I find his argument against schools as an entity that determines the experts compelling.
The resistance to Oster’s argument on Twitter shows many were willing to embrace uncertainty in the face of a novel problem and share their skepticism despite the consequences, meaning not all have fallen prey to a schooled mindset. And when Joe Rogan came under attack for spreading disinformation by engaging with a range of perspectives on COVID-related issues, he gained thousands of subscribers, pointing to a desire for the accessibility of diverse perspectives. Greater, unfettered access to information—whether via social media, podcasts, independent journalism, etc.—seems to be the answer, but only if it is free and open. How do we get there?