Quote

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.

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
Way
Humanity
Think
Create
Thinking
Desire
Cannot
Model
Become
Models
Live
Group
Must
Changes
Every
Groups

More quotes by Ivan Illich

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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 State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.
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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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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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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
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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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Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
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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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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
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The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
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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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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
Ivan Illich
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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
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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Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
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The household became the place where the consumption of wages takes place.
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Leadership does not depend on being right.
Ivan Illich
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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
Ivan Illich