Ivan Illich

1. ivan illich
bakhtiar mikhak
grassroots invention group
mit media lab

2. IVAN ILLICH
• Born in Vienna in 1926
• Attended a religious school from 1931-1941
• Expelled because of his Jewish maternal
ancestry
• Secondary studies at the University of
Florence in Italy
• Studied theology and philosophy at the
Gregorian University in Rome
• Doctorate in History from University of
Salzburg.

3. IVAN ILLICH
• Earmarked by Vatican for its diplomatic service
• Opted for pastoral ministry and was appointed
assistant parish priest to a New York Church
with Irish and Puerto Rican delegation (1951-
1956)
• Vice Rector at the Catholic University of Ponce
in Puerto Rico (Until 1960)
• Worked on spreading the idea of intercultural
sensibility by establishing the Center for
Intercultural Communication

4. IVAN ILLICH
• Back to New York to Fordham University
• In 1961 he established the Center for
Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) in
Cuernavaca, Mexico.
• Education of American missionaries for work in
Latin America
• Ideas of ‘deschooled’ education was put into
practice at CIDOC
• Transform every moment of life into a learning
experience, usually outside of school system

5. IVAN ILLICH
• Disassociated CIDOC from the Catholic
Church in 1968
• Left the priesthood in 1969
• Focused on developing an educational
thinking from 1960-mid 1970s
• Later he focused on other institutional
problems in modern society
• Moved to Europe in the late 1970s.

6. Deschooling Society
• Universal education through schooling is not feasible
• Neither new attitudes of teachers towards their
pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware
and software, nor finally an attempt to expand the
teacher’s responsibility until it engulfs the pupils’
lifetimes will deliver universal education
• The goal should be to establish educational webs
which heighten the opportunity for learning sharing
and caring.
• The ethos of the society must be deschooled
• The right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to
attend school

7. Deschooling Society
• He denounced the institutionalized education and the
institution of school as producers of merchandise
with a specific exchange value in society where those
who already possess a certain cultural capital derive
the most benefit.
• He asserts that the prestige of school as a supplier of
good quality educational services for the population
rests of myths:
– Myth of institutionalized values
– Myth of the measurement of values
– Myth of packaging values
– Myth of self-perpetuating progress

8. Myth of institutionalized values
– grounded in the belief that the process of schooling produces
something of value. That belief generates a demand.
– It is assumed that the school produces learning. The
existence of schools produces the demand for schooling. Thus
the school suggests that valuable learning is the result of
attendance, that the value of learning increases with the
amount of this attendance, and that this value can be
measured and documented by grades and certificates.
– Illich takes the opposite view: that learning is the human
activity that least needs manipulation by others; that most
learning is the result not of instruction but of participation by
learners in meaningful settings.
– School, however, makes them identify their personal,
cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.

9. Myth of the measurement of values
People who submit to the standard of others
for the measure of their own personal growth
soon apply the same standard to themselves.
They no longer have to be put in their place
but put themselves into their assigned slots,
squeeze themselves into the niche which they
have been taught to seek, and in the very
process, put their fellows into their places,
too, until everybody and everything fits.

10. Myth of packaging values
• The school sells the curriculum, says Illich, and the result
of the curriculum production process looks like any other
modern staple product.
– The distributor/teacher delivers the finished product to the
consumer/pupil,
– whose reactions are carefully studied and charted to provide
research data for the preparation of the next model
– which may be ‘ungraded’, ‘student-designed’, ‘visually-aided’,
or ‘issue-centred’.

11. Myth of self-perpetuating progress
• Illich talks not only about consumption but about production and
growth.
• He links these with the race for degrees, diplomas and
certificates, since the greater one’s share of educational
qualifications the greater one’s chances of a good job.
• For Illich the working of consumer societies is founded to a great
extent on this myth, and its perpetuation is an important part of
the game of permanent regimentation.
• To smash it, says Illich, ‘would endanger the survival not only of
the economic order built on the co-production of goods and
demands, but equally of the political order built on the nation-
State into which students are delivered by the school.’
• Consumers/pupils are taught to adjust their desires to
marketable values, even though this cycle of eternal progress
can never lead to maturity.

12. We must conceive of new relational structures which are
deliberately set up to facilitate access to these resources for
the use of anybody who is motivated to seek them for his
education. Administrative, technological, and especially legal
arrangements are required to set up such web-like structures.
Ivan Illich
from the “learning webs” chapter
in Deschooling Sciety

13. We must conceive of new relational structures which are
deliberately set up to facilitate access to these resources for
the use of anybody who is motivated to seek them for his
education. Administrative, technological, and especially legal
arrangements are required to set up such web-like structures.
Ivan Illich
from the “learning webs” chapter
in Deschooling Sciety

14. Schooling—the production of knowledge, the marketing of knowledge, which
is what the school amounts to—draws society into the trap of thinking that
knowledge is hygienic, pure, respectable, deodorized, produced by human
heads and amassed in a stock. I see no difference between rich and poor
countries in the development of these attitudes to knowledge. There is a
difference of degree, of course; but I find it much more interesting to
analyze the hidden impact of the school structure on a society; and I see
that this impact is equal or, to be more precise, tends to be equal. It doesn’t
matter what the overt structure of the curriculum is, whether the school is
public, whether it exists in a State that has the monopoly of public schools,
or in a State where private schools are tolerated or even encouraged. It is
the same in rich as in poor countries, and might be described as follows: if
this ritual that I consider schooling to be is defined by a society as education
[...] then the members of that society, by making schooling compulsory, are
schooled to believe that the self-taught individual is to be discriminated
against; that learning and the growth of cognitive capacity, require a
process of consumption of services presented in an industrial, a planned, a
professional form;[...] that learning is a thing rather than an activity. A thing
that can be amassed and measured, the possession of which is a measure of
the productivity of the individual within the society. That is, of his social
value [...]

15. Someone who wants to learn knows that he needs both
information and critical response to its use from somebody else.
Information can be stored in things and in persons. In a good
educational system access to things ought to be available at the
sole bidding of the learner, while access to informants requires,
in addition, others' consent.
Ivan Illich
from the “learning webs” chapter
in Deschooling Sciety

16. Educational resources are usually labeled according to
educators' curricular goals. I propose to do the contrary, to
label four different approaches which enable the student to
gain access to any educational resource which may help him
to define and achieve his own goals:
1. Reference Services to Educational Objects
2. Skill Exchanges
3. Peer-Matching
4. Reference Services to Educators-at-Large
Ivan Illich
from the “learning webs” chapter
in Deschooling Sciety
peer-to-peer learning

17. People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the
freedom to make things among which they can live, to give
shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to
use in caring for and about others. Prisoners in rich countries
often have access to more things and services than members of
their families, but they have no say in how things are to be made
and cannot decide what to do with them. Their punishment
consists in being deprived of what I shall call "conviviality." They
are degraded to the status of mere consumers.

18. A convivial society would be the result of social
arrangements that guarantee for each member the most
ample and free access to the tools of the community and
limit this freedom only in favor of another member's equal
freedom.
In every society there are two ways of achieving specific
ends, such as locomotion, communication among people,
health, learning. One I call autonomous, the other
heteronomous. In the autonomous mode I move myself. In
the heteronomous mode I am strapped into a seat and
carried. In the autonomous mode I heal myself, and you
help me in my paralysis, and I help you in your
childbearing [...]In every society and in every sector, the
efficiency with which the goal of the sector is achieved
depends on an interaction between the autonomous and
the heteronomous modes.

19. This reversal would permit the evolution of a life style and of a
political system which give priority to the protection, the
maximum use, and the enjoyment of the one resource that is
almost equally distributed among all people: personal energy
under personal control. I will argue that we can no longer live
and work effectively without public controls over tools and
institutions that curtail or negate any person's right to the
creative use of his or her energy. For this purpose we need
procedures to ensure that controls over the tools of society are
established and governed by political process rather than by
decisions by experts.

20. Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual
relates himself in action to his society through the use of
tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively
acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools, he can
invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is
mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his
own self-image. Convivial tools are those which give each
person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich
the environment with the fruits of his or her vision.
Industrial tools deny this possibility to those who use them
and they allow their designers to determine the meaning
and expectations of others. Most tools today cannot be
used in a convivial fashion.

21. What is fundamental to a convivial society is not the total
absence of manipulative institutions and addictive goods
and services, but the balance between those tools which
create the specific demands they are specialized to satisfy
and those complementary, enabling tools which foster self-
realization. The first set of tools produces according to
abstract plans for men in general; the other set enhances
the ability of people to pursue their own goals in their
unique way.