tessimal

Dec 05, 2002 17:41 PST
Ivan Illich died this week, at the age of 74.
http://www.austin360.com/aas/news/ap/ap_story.html/Intl/AP.V8504.AP-
Obit-Illich.html

Illich was involved in early education reform, author of The
Deschooling Society that influenced the thinking of John Holt, John
Taylor Gatto and many others, and had some thought provoking ideas
about health care and other social issues.

Ivan Illich on Schools:

"Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what
the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and
substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the
more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation
leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching
with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with
competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His
imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value.
Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the
improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military
poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.
Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavour are
defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which
claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on
allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools,
and other agencies in question."

Ivan Illich - Deschooling Society (1973: 9)

Read more about Illich at these websites:
http://philosophy.la.psu.edu/illich/deschool/intro.html
http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ira/illich/
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm
http://philosophy.la.psu.edu/illich/profile.html

"To deschool means to abolish the power of one person
to oblige another person to attend a meeting." - Ivan Illich

Norma
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SosinkyHS

Helen Hegener

At 12:37 PM +0000 12/6/02, tessimal wrote:
>Illich was involved in early education reform, author of The
>Deschooling Society that influenced the thinking of John Holt, John
>Taylor Gatto and many others, and had some thought provoking ideas
>about health care and other social issues.

I referenced Illich's work in an editorial for our March/April '02 issue:

http://www.home-ed-magazine.com/HEM/192/mapubnote.html

A couple of excerpts:

When John Holt's book Teach Your Own: A Hopeful Path for Education
(New York: Dell) was published in 1981, it quickly became the
front-runner in a then-small selection of books about taking or
keeping kids out of school. John Holt wrote to his friend Ivan Illich
in 1972: "... In working for the kind of changes we want, for a
convivial society and a nonsuicidal technology, you and I may have
slightly different functions. You may be somewhat more of a prophet
and I somewhat more of a tactician ..." (from a speech by Patrick
Farenga at Penn. State University, 1977).

In Deschooling Society Ivan Illich had written, "The very existence
of obligatory schools divides any society into two realms: some time
spans and processes and treatments and professions are 'academic' or
'pedagogic,' and others are not. The power of school thus to divide
social reality has no boundaries: Education becomes unworldly and the
world becomes noneducational."

Helen