Ivan Illich (1926–2002)
Author of Deschooling Society
About the Author
Born in Vienna in 1926, Ivan Illich grew up in Europe. He studied theology, philosophy, history, and natural science. During the 1950s he worked as a parish priest among Puerto Ricans in the Hell's Kitchen section of New York City and then served as rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. show more During the 1960s he founded centers for cross-cultural communication, first in Puerto Rico and then in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Since the late 1970s, he has divided his time among Mexico, the United States, and Germany. He is also a professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Penn State University. Illich's radical anarchist views first became widely known through a set of four books published during the early 1970s---Deschooling Society (1971), Tools for Conviviality (1973), Energy and Equity (1974), and Medical Nemesis (1976). Tools is the most general statement of Illich's principles; the other three expand on examples sketched in Today in order to critique what he calls "radical monopolies" in the technologies of education, energy consumption, and medical treatment. This critique applies equally to both the so-called developed and the developing nations but in different ways. Two subsequent collections of occasional pieces---Toward a History of Needs (1978) and Shadow Work (1981)---stress the distorting influence on society and culture of the economics of scarcity, or the presumption that economies function to remedy scarcities rather than to share goods. Toward a History of Needs also initiates a project in the history or archaeology of ideas that takes its first full-bodied shape in Gender (1982), an attempt to recover social experiences of female-male complementarity that have been obscured by the modern economic regime. H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness (1985) extends this project into a history of "stuff." ABC:The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1988) carries Illich's project forward into the area of literacy, as does his most recent book, In the Vineyard of the Text (1993). In the Mirror of the Past (1992) is a collection of occasional essays and talks from the 1980s, linking his concerns with economics, education, history, and the new ideological meaning of life. Illich himself is a polymath who speaks at least six languages fluently and who writes regularly in three of these (English, Spanish, and German); his books have been translated into more than 15 other languages. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Ivan Illich (4 septembre 1926 à Vienne en Autriche - 2 décembre 2002 à Brême en Allemagne)
Works by Ivan Illich
Pervertimento del cristianesimo. Conversazioni con David Cayley su Vangelo, chiesa, modernità (2012) 2 copies
Pentru a deşcolariza societatea 2 copies
Educação sem Escola? 1 copy
ALTERNATIVAS. 1 copy
Descolarizzare la societa 1 copy
Libertar o futuro 1 copy
"In Lieu of Education" 1 copy
"The Myth of Education." 1 copy
"Should We Abolish Schools?" 1 copy
History of Needs: Essays 1 copy
Amicus Mortis 1 copy
La Iglesia sin poder: Ensayos (1955-1985) (Estructuras y Procesos. Religión) (Spanish Edition) (2021) 1 copy
Tuketim Koleligi 1 copy
A Convivencialidade Livro 1 1 copy
Vernakularne vrijednosti 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Illich, Ivan
- Other names
- Illich, Ivan Dominic
- Birthdate
- 1926-09-04
- Date of death
- 2002-12-02
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- Austria
- Birthplace
- Vienna, Austria
- Place of death
- Bremen, Germany
- Places of residence
- New York, New York, USA
Puerto Rico
Cuernavaca, Mexico - Education
- Florence University
Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, Italy - Occupations
- philosopher
Roman Catholic priest - Organizations
- Roman Catholic Church
Members
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Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 72
- Members
- 4,115
- Popularity
- #6,114
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 38
- ISBNs
- 254
- Languages
- 16
- Favorited
- 14
- compulsory education is a transgression on freedom and dignity
- compulsory education destroys the essential desire to learn and educate oneself under their own volition
- compulsory education is boot camp for a society in which our main duty is to consume
From these criticisms of the educational system as it exists in effectively every corner of the Earth, he extends out into an extremely compelling and (to my ears) highly novel argument against the institutionalization of every aspect of modern life.
Ilich was clearly a highly accomplished and down to earth man who didn’t put much stock in impotent theory - this book is full of practical recommendations as to how to institute the decentralized, curriculum-free version of education he supports. This is some of the drier material in the book, but it’s also valuable to conceiving how such a radical overhaul of one of society’s most basic concepts - the school - might be carried out. And yet, such a vast topic requires much more fleshing out than it gets here, which is ok because this is a book about ideas, not an instruction manual. But as an “educator” myself who would be enthusiastic about putting Ilich’s ideas into practice, I still struggle to envision how education would look under his proposed system.
This book is prescient in so many ways. Illich absolutely predicted the internet in terms of its functionality, but he doesn’t say much about how such a system would be administered and maintained. Perhaps he thought the deschooling of society would occur before technology reached the point we are at now. But even in a world where you can learn almost anything by yourself simply by opening a web browser, the systematic coercion of our educational system, it’s monopoly on the criterium of success remains stalwart. Illich obviously wanted his readers to feel hopeful about the possibility of his educational webs idea (in fact the concept of “hope” is a central concept to the closing part of the book) and so focused on a rather utopian conception of what it would look like; I can’t imagine he would be so naive about that fact that under our current system such a “web” would immediately be monetized by the most craven of capitalist accumulators. This brings me to what I think is the biggest hole in his argument, a kind of educational chicken or the egg; is our fucked society a result of our educational system or is our fucked educational system a result of our society. Illich bucks the typical answer by saying it’s the former rather than the latter, but I’m not sure I feel convinced of that fact after reading this book. That’s not a major slight as there is only so much you can cover in a rather slim volume.… (more)