Quote

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.

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
Whole
Miracle
Diabolical
Health
Populations
Personal
Consists
Levels
Survive
Modern
Individuals
Making
Lows
Individual
Medicine
True
Population
Inhumanly

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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
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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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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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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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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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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
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The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
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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.
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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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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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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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