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The public school has become the established church of secular society.

Ivan Illich

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Ivan Illich
Age: 76 †
Born: 1926
Born: September 4
Died: 2002
Died: December 2
Anthropologist
Catholic Priest
Historian
Literary Critic
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Writer
Vienna
Austria
Ivan D. Illich
Ivan Dominic Illich
School
Secular
Established
Public
Education
Church
Society
Become

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People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
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Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
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Effective health care depends on self-care this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.
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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
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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.
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Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.
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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
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Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet in an environment equally fit for birth, growth work, healing, and dying... Healthy people need no bureaucratic interference to mate, give birth, share the human condition and die.
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School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.
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School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
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The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.
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The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.
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Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down, because people cease to be able to govern themselves they demand to be managed.
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The pupil's imagination is 'schooled' to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.
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We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
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School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises which life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition.
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The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies.
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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
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