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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

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It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.
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If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.
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The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.
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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 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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To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.
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At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.
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Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
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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 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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We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
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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 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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School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
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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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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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The household became the place where the consumption of wages takes place.
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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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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
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