Quote

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.

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
Teaching
Overwhelming
Accepting
Despite
Learning
Contrary
Results
Institutions
Axiom
Education
Result
Axioms
Wisdom
Accept
Institutional
School
Evidence
Institution
Built
Continues

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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 public school has become the established church of secular society.
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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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Leadership does not depend on being right.
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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.
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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 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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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
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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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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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The depersonalizati on of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice from an ethical into a technical problem.
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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
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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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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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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
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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 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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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
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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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