Ivan Illich Quotes

Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.

It's always extremely interesting to speak at colleges. My books are taught in many colleges in America and are part of the educational system, so it's really important to me. I don't believe in so many things in life, but something I believe in is education.

We're going to have the best-educated American people in the world.

To know the rules of the game, you have to be educated.

The importance of all education lies far more in the training of minds than in any facts which may be absorbed, for trained minds will ascertain the facts as they need to know them. Having learned to reason and to weigh the information they discover, people with such minds will be more nearly educated than any amount of cramming of definite facts into their heads will make them.

The savage and women are not what we call intellectual because they are not taught to know and manipulate the materials of knowledge.

A school that believes in the power of knowledge and learning will have reading at its core.

When someone is taught the joy of learning, it becomes a life-long process that never stops, a process that creates a logical individual. That is the challenge and joy of teaching.

Educated fools; from uneducated schools.

The education is the answer to everything, really, and on so many different levels. The minutiae of life require analytical skills that you learn in being educated, an ability to navigate the very systems that constitute life. They all require some degree of education, and if you don't get it, you're at a real disadvantage.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

By playing games you can artificially speed up your learning curve to develop the right kind of thought processes.

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.

A good education should leave much to be desired.

Education is not just about going to school and getting a degree. It's about widening your knowledge and absorbing the truth about life.

I need a teacher quite as much as Helen. I know the education of this child will be the distinguishing event of my life, if I have the brains and perseverance to accomplish it.

I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively.

Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth.

Education is the process in which we discover that learning adds quality to our lives. Learning must be experienced.

Anyone who has passed though the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.

I believe primary and secondary education is the bedrock of any sustainable society.

Looking back, I realize that nurturing curiosity and the instinct to seek solutions are perhaps the most important contributions education can make.

Memory and creativity are essential to education, but if you teach memory incorrectly, it is a total waste of time, and it will inhibit learning.