Quotes from Ivan Illich

Most people, throughout history, haven't learned one language to the exclusion of another. You learn to speak differently to a peasant and to a shoemaker. You speak differently to your mother, who comes from Burgundy, and to your father, who comes from Swabia.

School divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the simple fact that a school has been built to serve them.

At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.

To hell with the future. It's a man-eating idol.

Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organised to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.

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.

Effective health care depends on self-care this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.

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.

I've nothing against schools! I'm against compulsory schooling.

There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God

The college and university systems, at least, have become like television. There's a bit of this and a bit of that and some compulsory program with its components connected in a way that only a planner could understand.

The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.

Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.

It is really an alienation to believe that learning is the result of teaching.

The pupil is ... 'schooled' to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.

The most important thing you learn at school is that learning only happens by being taught.

Once the Third World has become a mass market for the goods, products, and processes which are designed by the rich for themselves, the discrepancy between demand for these Western artifacts and the supply will increase indefinitely.

So persuasive is the power of the institutions we have created that they shape not only our preferences but actually our sense of possibilities.

Leadership does not depend on being right.

Schools that are freely accessible allow the organization of certain specific learning tasks which a person might propose to himself. Schools, when they are compulsory - as we see at this moment in the United States - create a dazed population, a 'learned' population, a mentally pretentious population, such as we have never seen before.

We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them.

In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.

The myth of unending consumption has taken the place of the belief in life everlasting.