Quote

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

More quotes by Ivan Illich

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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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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
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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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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.
Ivan Illich
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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
Ivan Illich
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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
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Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
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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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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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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
Ivan Illich
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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.
Ivan Illich
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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.
Ivan Illich
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School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
Ivan Illich
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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.
Ivan Illich
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People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
Ivan Illich
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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.
Ivan Illich
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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.
Ivan Illich
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Societies in which most people depend for most of their goods and services on the personal whim, kindness, or skill of another are called underdeveloped, while those in which living has been transformed into a process of ordering from an all-encompassing store catalogue are called advanced.
Ivan Illich