Quote

School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.

Ivan Illich

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Makes
Schooling
School
Agency
Need
Advertising
Needs
Educational
Believe
Historical
Learning
Education
Society
Schooled

More quotes by Ivan Illich

Image
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
Image
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
Image
We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
Ivan Illich
Image
Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
Ivan Illich
Image
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.
Ivan Illich
Image
The public school has become the established church of secular society.
Ivan Illich
Image
At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
Ivan Illich
Image
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
Image
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.
Ivan Illich
Image
Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
Ivan Illich
Image
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
Image
To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
Ivan Illich
Image
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
Image
Leadership does not depend on being right.
Ivan Illich
Image
School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.
Ivan Illich
Image
The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
Ivan Illich
Image
Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.
Ivan Illich
Image
Effective health care depends on self-care this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.
Ivan Illich
Image
It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
Ivan Illich
Image
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