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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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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
Needs
Lose
Independence
Institutional
Life
Learned
Surprise
Incentive
People
Loses
Lessons
Surprises
Taught
Offers
Incentives
Grows
Close
Lesson
Relatedness
School
Teaching
Definition
Alienating
Find
Grow
Definitions
Predetermined
Need
Longer
Attractive
Prepares

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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
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Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
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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.
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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
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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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We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
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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 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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The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
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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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We can only live changes: we cannot think our way to humanity. Every one of us, every group, must become the model of that which we desire to create.
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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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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
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