148 Quotes by Ivan Illich

School divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the simple fact that a school has been built to serve them.

Any attempt to reform the university without attending to the system of which it is an integral part is like trying to do urban renewal in New York City from the twelfth story up.

I intend to discuss some perplexing issues which are raised once we embrace the hypothesis that society can be deschooled; to search for criteria which may help us distinguish institutions which merit development because they support learning in a deschooled milieu; and to clarify those personal goals which would foster the advent of an Age of Leisure ( schole ) as opposed to an economy dominated by service industries.

To be ignorant or unconvinced of one's own needs has become the unforgivable anti-social act. The good citizen is one who imputes standardized needs to himself with such conviction that he drowns out any desire for alternatives, much less the renunciation of need.

Losses of a kind of satisfaction that have no market equivalent don't show up in the calculations of economists.

The medical establishment has become the major threat to health.

Current nationalism is merely the affirmation of the right of colonial elites to repeat historyand follow the road travelled by the rich toward the universal consumption of internationally marketed packages, a road which can ultimately lead only to universal pollution and universal frustration.

To hell with the future. It's a man-eating idol.

To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.