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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.

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

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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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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 the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
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The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.
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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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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 most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
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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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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
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Leadership does not depend on being right.
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The household became the place where the consumption of wages takes place.
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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 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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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
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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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People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
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The public school has become the established church of secular society.
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