Ivan Illich Quotes
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.
Cayley, David. Ivan Illich in Conversation. House of Anansi Press, 1992.
The Constitution, incredibly enough, never even mentioned education. But at one of the earliest opportunities available to Congress, it made this statement, the first on education by the United States government.
In almost all societies until recent times, many uneducated people—especially from rural areas—were not enthusiastic about sending their children to school. They worried about losing the farm or factory labor of the children, losing control / influence, children learning unacceptable moral or religious ideas, and social mobility was so poor that many parents thought that it would never help the children.
Ivan Dominic Illich was a Roman Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, and social critic. His 1971 book Deschooling Society criticises modern society's institutional approach to education, an approach that constrains learning to narrow situations in a fairly short period of the human lifespan. His 1975 book Medical Nemesis, importing to the sociology of medicine the concept of medical harm, argues that industrialised society widely impairs quality of life by overmedicalising life, pathologizing normal conditions, creating false dependency, and limiting other more healthful solutions. Illich called himself "an errant pilgrim."
