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 new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
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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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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 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.
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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 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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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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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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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
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Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
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We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
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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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People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
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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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School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
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Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
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The public school has become the established church of secular society.
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