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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.

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
Choices
Spontaneous
Upon
Ideology
Future
Developing
Action
Institutions
Life
Choice
Depends
Ideologies
Technology
Consumerism
Support
Technologies

More quotes by Ivan Illich

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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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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
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The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
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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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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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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
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Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.
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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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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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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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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
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Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
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Societies in which most people depend for most of their goods and services on the personal whim, kindness, or skill of another are called underdeveloped, while those in which living has been transformed into a process of ordering from an all-encompassing store catalogue are called advanced.
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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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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
Ivan Illich
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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.
Ivan Illich
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The depersonalizati on of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice from an ethical into a technical problem.
Ivan Illich
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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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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.
Ivan Illich