APA Dictionary of Psychology

n. an informal movement in the late 1960s and 1970s that criticized the formal educational system for emphasizing a narrow idea of academic knowledge and ignoring people’s real-life experience and the wider social context in which all learning takes place. Such thinkers and polemicists as Austrian-born U.S. writer Ivan Illich (1926–2002) sought to separate education from its institutional context and to promote the idea of informal lifelong learning. —deschool vb.