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Most 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

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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
Rather
Setting
Cognitive
Learn
Result
Manipulation
Makes
Teaching
Participation
School
Growth
Identify
Best
Personal
Instruction
People
Learning
Settings
Technology
Planning
Unhampered
Results
Meaningful
Elaborate

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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
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The more time, toil, and sacrifice spent by a population in producing medicine as a commodity, the larger will be the by-product, namely, the fallacy that society has a supply of health locked away which can be mined and marketed.
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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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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
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I believe that if something like a political life is to remain for us in this world of technology, then it begins with friendship. Therefore my task is to cultivate disciplined, self-denying, careful, tasteful friendships.
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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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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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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
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The true miracle of modern medicine is diabolical. It consists in making not only individuals but whole populations survive on inhumanly low levels of personal health.
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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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Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
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We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
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Leadership does not depend on being right.
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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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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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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
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The public school has become the established church of secular society.
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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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