Quotes by Ivan Illich

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

“Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isnt organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.”

“Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school”

“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.”

“It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they speak with the accent of natives they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds.”

“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.”

“The public school has become the established church of secular society.”

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

“We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.”

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

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.

School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.

School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.

We are the witnesses of a barely perceptible transformation in ordinary language: verbs which formerly expressed satisfying actions have been replaced by nouns which name packages designed for passive consumption only -- to learn becomes to accumulate credits.

Today, one must either be isolated and cut off, or a carefully guarded, affluent drop-out, to allow ones children to play in an environment where they listen to people rather than to stars, speakers, or instructors. All over the world, one can see the rapid encroachment of the disciplined acquiescence that characterizes the audience, the client, the customer.

In fact, healthy students often redouble their resistance to teaching as they find themselves more comprehensively manipulated. This resistance is due not to the authoritarian style of a public school or the seductive style of some free schools, but to the fundamental approach common to all schools-the idea that one persons judgment should determine what and when another person must learn.

Schools are even less efficient in the arrangement of the circumstances which encourage the open-ended, exploratory use of acquired skills, for which I will reserve the term liberal education. The main reason for this is that school is obligatory and becomes schooling for schoolings sake: an enforced stay in the company of teachers, which pays off in the doubtful privilege of more such company. Just as skill instruction must be freed from curricular restraints, so must liberal education be dissociated from obligatory attendance. Both skill-learningand education for inventive and creative behavior can be aided by institutional arrangement, but they are of a different, frequently opposed nature.

Skill teachers are made scarce by the belief in the value oflicenses. Certification constitutes a form of market manipulation and is plausible only to a schooled mind.Most teachers of arts and trades are less skillful, less inventive, and less communicative than the best craftsmenand tradesmen. Most high-school teachers of Spanish or French do not speak the language as correctly as theirpupils might after half a year of competent drills. Experimentsconducted by Angel Quintero in Puerto Ricosuggest that many young teen-agers, if given the proper incentives, programs, and access to tools, are better thanmost schoolteachers at introducing their peers to the scientific exploration of plants, stars, and matter, and to thediscovery of how and why a motor or a radio functions.

Work done off the paid job is looked down upon if not ignored. autonomous activity threatens the employment level, generates deviance, and detracts​ from the GNP...Work no longer means the creation of a value perceived by the worker but mainly a job, which is a social relationship. Unemployment means sad idleness, rather than the freedom to do things that are useful for oneself or for ones neighbour. An active woman who runs a house and brings up children and takes in those of others is distinguished from a woman who works, no matter how useless or damaging the product of this work might be.

A society dedicated to the protection of equally distributed, modern and effective tools for the exercise of productive liberties cannot come into existence unless the commodities and resources on which the exercise of those liberties is based are equally distributed to all.