Deschooling Theories in the 1960s and 1970s and the Educational Change, When Being Innovative Was Beyond the Educational Institutions

Introduction

In the context of the long 1960s, the deschooling theories occupied a preferential place for education. Their main theses are known. It is difficult to deny the importance that authors, such as John Holt, Ivan Illich, Everett Reimer, or Paul Goodman, had in exploring the boundaries of possible criticism of modern educational institutions. The hypothesis for this entry is that the irruption in the educational debate of deschooling theories in the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century could be analyzed as the last great attempt in the Western societies to generate a global theory of systemic change by means of rethinking educational institutions radically instead of introducing innovations to transform them. A change that was clearly identified as the way to build a different order of ideas and things. From the 1970s on, through the promotion of the ambiguous concept of innovation, the most influential supranational instances for the formation of the...