Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich
Ivan Illichwas an Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and "maverick social critic" of the institutions of contemporary Western culture and their effects on the provenance and practice of education, medicine, work, energy use, transportation, and economic development...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSociologist
Date of Birth4 September 1926
CountryUnited States of America
attempt attending city integral reform renewal system trying university urban york
Any attempt to reform the university without attending to the system of which it is an integral part is like trying to do urban renewal in New York City from the twelfth story up.
issues goal support
I intend to discuss some perplexing issues which are raised once we embrace the hypothesis that society can be deschooled; to search for criteria which may help us distinguish institutions which merit development because they support learning in a deschooled milieu; and to clarify those personal goals which would foster the advent of an Age of Leisure ( schole ) as opposed to an economy dominated by service industries.
ignorant desire needs
To be ignorant or unconvinced of one's own needs has become the unforgivable anti-social act. The good citizen is one who imputes standardized needs to himself with such conviction that he drowns out any desire for alternatives, much less the renunciation of need.
moments
At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
loss satisfaction kind
Losses of a kind of satisfaction that have no market equivalent don't show up in the calculations of economists.
health medicine medical
The medical establishment has become the major threat to health.
frustration affirmation rich
Current nationalism is merely the affirmation of the right of colonial elites to repeat historyand follow the road travelled by the rich toward the universal consumption of internationally marketed packages, a road which can ultimately lead only to universal pollution and universal frustration.
morning liars ideas
I was recently told, 'You're a liar!' when I said to somebody I walked down the spine of the Andes. Every Spaniard in the sixteenth, seventeenth century did that. The idea that somebody could just walk! He can jog perhaps in the morning, but he can't walk anywhere! The world has become inaccessible because we drive there.
men idols eating
To hell with the future. It's a man-eating idol.
mean power-of-one persons
To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
art people silence
It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they "speak with the accent of natives" they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds.
school men together
Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.
expectations poor-nations rich
In both rich and poor nations consumption is polarized while expectation is equalized.
life disease want
I don't want to die of some disease I want to die of death