01c. 1964 ADMost learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
02c. 1964 ADSchool has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
03c. 1964 ADSchool is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
04c. 1964 ADWe are the witnesses of a barely perceptible transformation in ordinary language: verbs which formerly expressed satisfying actions have been replaced by nouns which name packages designed for passive consumption only -- 'to learn' becomes 'to accumulate credits'.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
05c. 1964 ADToday, one must either be isolated and cut off, or a carefully guarded, affluent drop-out, to allow one's children to play in an environment where they listen to people rather than to stars, speakers, or instructors. All over the world, one can see the rapid encroachment of the disciplined acquiescence that characterizes the audience, the client, the customer.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
06c. 1964 ADIn fact, healthy students often redouble their resistance to teaching as they find themselves more comprehensively manipulated. This resistance is due not to the authoritarian style of a public school or the seductive style of some free schools, but to the fundamental approach common to all schools-the idea that one person's judgment should determine what and when another person must learn.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
07c. 1964 ADSchools are even less efficient in the arrangement of the circumstances which encourage the open-ended, exploratory use of acquired skills, for which I will reserve the term "liberal education." The main reason for this is that school is obligatory and becomes schooling for schooling's sake: an enforced stay in the company of teachers, which pays off in the doubtful privilege of more such company. Just as skill instruction must be freed from curricular restraints, so must liberal education be dissociated from obligatory attendance. Both skill-learningand education for inventive and creative behavior can be aided by institutional arrangement, but they are of a different, frequently opposed nature.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
08c. 1964 ADSkill teachers are made scarce by the belief in the value oflicenses. Certification constitutes a form of market manipulation and is plausible only to a schooled mind.Most teachers of arts and trades are less skillful, less inventive, and less communicative than the best craftsmenand tradesmen. Most high-school teachers of Spanish or French do not speak the language as correctly as theirpupils might after half a year of competent drills. Experimentsconducted by Angel Quintero in Puerto Ricosuggest that many young teen-agers, if given the proper incentives, programs, and access to tools, are better thanmost schoolteachers at introducing their peers to the scientific exploration of plants, stars, and matter, and to thediscovery of how and why a motor or a radio functions.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
09c. 1964 ADWork done off the paid job is looked down upon if not ignored. autonomous activity threatens the employment level, generates deviance, and detracts from the GNP...Work no longer means the creation of a value perceived by the worker but mainly a job, which is a social relationship. Unemployment means sad idleness, rather than the freedom to do things that are useful for oneself or for one's neighbour. An active woman who runs a house and brings up children and takes in those of others is distinguished from a woman who 'works,' no matter how useless or damaging the product of this work might be.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
10c. 1964 ADA society dedicated to the protection of equally distributed, modern and effective tools for the exercise of productive liberties cannot come into existence unless the commodities and resources on which the exercise of those liberties is based are equally distributed to all.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
11c. 1964 ADExcessive forms of wealth and prolonged formal employment, no matter how well distributed, destroy the social, cultural, and environmental conditions for equal productive freedom.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
12c. 1964 ADThe re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
13c. 1964 ADIn a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
14c. 1964 ADThe quality of a society and of its culture will depend on the status of its unemployed.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
15c. 1964 ADOur market-intensive societies measure material progress by the increase in the volume and variety of commodities produced. And taking our cue from this sector, we measure social progress by the distribution of access to these commodities. Economics has been developed as propaganda for the takeover by large-scale commodity producers.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
16c. 1964 ADIn the Middle Ages there was no salvation outside the Church, and the theologians had a hard time explaining what God did with those pagans who were visibly virtuous or saintly. Similarly, in contemporary society effort is not productive unless it is done at the behest of a boss, and economists have a hard time dealing with the obvious usefulness of people when they are outside the corporate control of a corporation, volunteer agency, or labour camp.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
17c. 1964 ADIn an advanced industrial society it becomes almost impossible to seek, even to imagine, unemployment as a condition for autonomous, useful work. The infrastructure of society is arranged so that only the job gives access to the tools of production...Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
18c. 1964 ADThe world-wide discrimination against the autodidact has vitiated many people's confidence in determining their own goals and needs. But the same discrimination has also resulted in a multiplicity of growing minorities who are infuriated by this insidious dispossession.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
19c. 1964 ADHousework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
20c. 1964 ADWherever the shadow of economic growth touches us, we are left useless unless employed on a job or engaged in consumption...We lose sight of our resources, lose control over the environmental conditions which make these resources applicable, lose taste for self-reliant coping with challenges from without and anxiety from within.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
21c. 1964 ADP3- every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permit the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of povertyIvan Illich / quote ↗
22c. 1964 ADThe first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services....What people do or make but will not or cannot put up for sale is as immeasurable and as invaluable for the economy as the oxygen they breathe.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
23c. 1964 ADAll governments stress an employment-intensive force of production, but are unwilling to recognize that jobs can also destroy the use-value of free time. They all stress a more objective and complete professional definition of people's needs, but are insensitive to the consequent expropriation of life.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
24c. 1964 ADInstitutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.Ivan Illich / quote ↗
