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

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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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Leadership does not depend on being right.
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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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Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
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People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.
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The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.
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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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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
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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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