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

More quotes by 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.
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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 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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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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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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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
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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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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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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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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 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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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
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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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Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
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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 public school has become the established church of secular society.
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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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Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
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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