Ivan Illich Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.

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

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

The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Health is not an objective condition which can be understood by the methods of natural science alone. It is rather a condition related to the mental attitude by which the individual has to value what is essential for his life.

The medicalization of early diagnosis not only hampers and discourages preventative health-care but it also trains the patient-to-be to function in the meantime as an acolyte to his doctor. He learns to depend on the physician in sickness and in health. He turns into a life-long patient.

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.

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

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

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 future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies.

The depersonalizati on of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice from an ethical into a technical problem.

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

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.

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

To be ignorant or unconvinced of one's own needs has become the unforgivable anti-social act. The good citizen is one who imputes standardized needs to himself with such conviction that he drowns out any desire for alternatives, much less the renunciation of need.

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.

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.

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.

Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting it's necessity;

only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.

A low-energy policy allows for a wide choice of life-styles and cultures.

If, on the other hand, a society opts for high energy consumption, its social relations must be dictated by technocracy and will be equally degrading whether labeled capitalist or socialist.

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

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

Modern medicine is a negation of health.

It isn't organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.

Current nationalism is merely the affirmation of the right of colonial elites to repeat historyand follow the road travelled by the rich toward the universal consumption of internationally marketed packages, a road which can ultimately lead only to universal pollution and universal frustration.

The medical establishment has become the major threat to health.

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

The goals of development are always and everywhere stated in terms of consumer value packages standardized around the North Atlantic-and therefore always and everywhere imply more privileges for a few... Underdevelopment is the result of a state of mind common to both socialist and capitalist countries. Present development goals are neither desirable nor reasonable. Unfortunately antiimperialism is no antidote.

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.

Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends upon knowing that secret; that secrets can only be known in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.

Exporting Church employees to Latin America masks a universal and unconscious fear of a new Church. North and South American authorities, differently motivated but equally fearful, become accomplices in maintaining a clerical and irrelevant Church. Sacralizing employees and property, this Church becomes progressively more blind to the possibilities of Sacralizing person and community.

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

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

Traditional society was more like a set of concentric circles of meaningful structures, while modern man must learn how to find meaning in many structures to which he is only marginally related. In the village, language and architecture and religion and work and family customs were consistent with one another, mutually explanatory and reinforcing. To grow into one implied a growth into others.

The USDHEW calculates that 7% of all patients suffer compensable injuries while hospitalized .....One out of every five patients admitted to a typical research hospital acquires an iatrogenic (Caused by the treatment process) disease, one case in thirty leading to death. Half of these episodes result from complications of drug therapy; amazingly, one in ten come from diagnostic procedures.

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

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

I intend to discuss some perplexing issues which are raised once we embrace the hypothesis that society can be deschooled; to search for criteria which may help us distinguish institutions which merit development because they support learning in a deschooled milieu; and to clarify those personal goals which would foster the advent of an Age of Leisure (schole) as opposed to an economy dominated by service industries.

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.