Ivan Illich Quotes

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

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

We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.

At the moment of death I hope to be surprised.

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.

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

Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.

In both rich and poor nations consumption is polarized while expectation is equalized.

Leadership does not depend on being right.

If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story.

Schools themselves pervert the natural inclination to grow and learn into the demand for instruction.

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

P3- every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permit the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty

Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity; only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.

P3- everywhere not only education but society as a whole needs deschooling.

P24- the power of school loss to divide social reality has no boundaries education becomes unworldly and the world becomes noneducational

The medical establishment has become the major threat to health.

What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?

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

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

P3- modernised poverty combines the lack of power over circumstances with a loss of personal potency

Schools teach the need to be taught.

People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that work for them.

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

Any industrial product that comes in per capita quanta beyond a given intensity exercises a radical monopoly over the satisfaction of a need.

The public is indoctrinated to believe that skills are valuable and reliable only if they are the result of formal schooling.

The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance.

I don't want to die of some disease I want to die of death

The household has become the place where the consumption of wages takes place

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

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

Carry a candle in the dark, be a candle in the dark, know that you're a flame in the dark.

I know of no industrial society where women are the economic equals of men. Of everything that economics measures, women get less.

Losses of a kind of satisfaction that have no market equivalent don't show up in the calculations of economists.

A political program which does not explicitly recognize the need for deschooling is not revolutionary; it is demagoguery calling for more of the same.

To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.

Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us.

P8- mere existence of school discourages and disables the poor from taking control of their own learning.

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

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

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

P7- citizens have learned to think rich and live poor.