Ivan Illich

school advertice believe society

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

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

learning instruction participation meaningful

“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 (1926-2002)

school world religion proletariat salvation poor technology

“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 (1926-2002)

machine people chain electronic degrade dignity intolerable

“The machine-like behavior of people chained to electronics constitutes a degradation of their well-being and of their dignity which, for most people in the long run, becomes intolerable. 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.”

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

man choose rich things freedom use

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

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

school institution life teach apathy

“School prepares people for the alienating institutionalization of life, by teaching the necessity of being taught. Once this lesson is learned, people loose their incentive to develop independently; they no longer find it attractive to relate to each other, and the surprises that life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition are closed.”

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

modern medicine negation health institution sick

“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.”

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

welfare bureaucracy monopoly modern poverty

“Welfare bureaucracies claim a professional, political, and financial monopoly over the social imagination, setting standards of what is valuable and what is feasible. This monopoly is at the root of the modernization of poverty. Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty. Once basic needs have been translated by a society into demands for scientifically produced commodities, poverty is defined by standards which the technocrats can change at will. Poverty then refers to those who have fallen behind an advertised ideal of consumption in some important respect.”

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

institution children school need learn teach

“Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.”

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

school pervert nature demand instruction

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

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

destructive welfare institution hierarchy administration moral

"no amount of dollars can remove the inherent destructiveness off welfare institutions once the professional hierarchies off these have convinced society that their ministrations are morally necessary.”

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

existence shool disable poor control learning

"…mere existence of school discourages and disables the poor from taking control of their own learning.”

— Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

energy degrade social relation destroy physical milieu

"high quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu."

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

society energy policy well-being

"At this moment, most societies—especially the poor ones—are still free to set their energy policies by any of three guidelines. Well-being can be identified with high amounts of per capita energy use, with high efficiency of energy transformation, or with the least possible use of mechanical energy by the most powerful members of society. The first approach would stress tight management of scarce and destructive fuels on behalf of industry,

whereas the second would emphasize the retooling of industry in the interest of thermodynamic thrift. These first two attitudes necessarily imply huge public expenditures and increased social control; both rationalize the emergence of a computerized Leviathan, and both are at present widely discussed."

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

energy ceiling social relation equity

"… only a ceiling on energy use can lead to social relations that are characterized by high levels of equity."

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

energy per capita wattage social progress equity

"Below a threshold of per capita wattage, motors improve the conditions for social progress. Above this threshold, energy grows at the expense of equity. Further energy affluence then means decreased distribution of control over that energy."

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

energy nonpolluting power society physical harmless enslaving

"Even if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving.

A community can choose between Methadone and “cold turkey”—between maintaining its addiction to alien energy and kicking it in painful cramps—but no society can have a population that is hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy slaves and whose members are also autonomously active."

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

energy threshold bureaucracy personal initiative limit social

"Once the critical quantum of per capita energy is surpassed, education for the abstract goals of a bureaucracy must supplant the legal guarantees of personal and concrete initiative. This quantum is the limit of social order."

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

energy people overpower calorie food tool

"A people can be just as dangerously overpowered by the wattage of its tools as by the caloric content of its foods, but it is much harder to confess to a national overindulgence in wattage than to a sickening diet.A people can be just as dangerously overpowered by the wattage of its tools as by the caloric content of its foods, but it is much harder to confess to a national overindulgence in wattage than to a sickening diet."

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

energy western country consumer conveyance

" In every Western country, passenger mileage on all types of conveyance increased by a factor of a hundred within fifty years of building the first railroad.

When the ratio of their respective power outputs passed beyond a certain value, mechanical transformers of mineral fuels excluded people from the use of their metabolic energy and forced them to become captive consumers of conveyance."

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

energy democracy society speed bicycle

" Participatory democracy demands low-energy technology, and free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle."

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

energy passenger transport space time deformed

"The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role."

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

energy passenger political power feet tongue client media

" The habitual passenger has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He does not insist on his freedom to move and to speak to people but on his claim to be shipped and to be informed by media."

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

energy society price time equity vehicular speed

"As societies put price tags on time, equity and vehicular speed correlate inversely."

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

energy threshold industrial complex time cost transport

"Beyond a critical threshold, the output of the industrial complex established to move people costs a society more time than it saves. The marginal utility of an increment in the speed of a small number of people has for its price the growing marginal disutility of this acceleration for the great majority."

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

energy industry quanta monopoly learning environment

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

Beyond some point, compulsory schooling destroys the environment for learning, medical delivery systems dry up the nontherapeutic sources of health, and transportation smothers traffic."

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

energy walking thermodynamic vehicle animal

"Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending 0.75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals."

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)

bicycle pedestrian efficiency energy

"Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. 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."

― Ivan Illich (1926-2002)