Quote

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.

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
Social
Accepting
Medical
Poise
Place
Military
Protection
Schooled
Care
Health
Safety
Pupils
Work
Security
Police
Rats
Life
Imagination
Service
Mistaken
Race
National
Treatment
Community
Accept
Productive
Values
Value
Improvement
Pupil

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The public school has become the established church of secular society.
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The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.
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There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God
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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 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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Leadership does not depend on being right.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
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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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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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The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.
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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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Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
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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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