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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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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
Curtailed
Together
Schooled
Come
Attend
Right
Obligation
Men
Historical
Realize
Realizing
Learn

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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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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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The depersonalizati on of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice from an ethical into a technical problem.
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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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People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
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School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
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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.
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The public school has become the established church of secular society.
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We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
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The household became the place where the consumption of wages takes place.
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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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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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The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies.
Ivan Illich
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The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
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.
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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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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
Ivan Illich