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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
Need
Longer
Attractive
Prepares
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

More quotes by Ivan Illich

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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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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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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.
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The household became the place where the consumption of wages takes place.
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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
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People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
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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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The depersonalizati on of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice from an ethical into a technical problem.
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Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
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The public school has become the established church of secular society.
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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
Ivan Illich
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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.
Ivan Illich
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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.
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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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 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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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
Ivan Illich
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Leadership does not depend on being right.
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.
Ivan Illich