Ivan Illich > Quotes

“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”
― Ivan Illich

“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.”
― Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

“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.”
― Ivan Illich

“Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic "economic" behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age.”
― Ivan Illich

“The household has become the place where the consumption of wages takes place”
― Ivan Illich, Shadow Work

“Carry a candle in the dark, be a candle in the dark, know that you're a flame in the dark.”
― Ivan Illich

“School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.”
― Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

“Les enfants sont par définition des apprentis, et apprendre est l'activité humaine qui nécessite le moins de manipulation par autrui. La majeure partie de l'apprentissage n'est pas le resultat de l'instruction. Elle serait plutôt le résultat d'une participation dans un environnement chargé de sens.”
― Ivan Illich

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

“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.”
― Ivan Illich