“The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their… — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
“In the Middle Ages there was no salvation outside the Church, and the theologians had a hard time explaining what God did… — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
“Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are… — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
“All governments stress an employment-intensive force of production, but are unwilling to recognize that jobs can also destroy the use-value of free… — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
“Our market-intensive societies measure material progress by the increase in the volume and variety of commodities produced. And taking our cue from… — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
“Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very… — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
Up to now, economic development has always meant that people, instead of doing something, are enabled to buy it... Economic development has… — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
“In an advanced industrial society it becomes almost impossible to seek, even to imagine, unemployment as a condition for autonomous, useful work.… — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
“In the late Middle Ages the stupefying simplicity of the heliocentric model was used as an argument to discredit the new astronomy.… — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
“Wherever the shadow of economic growth touches us, we are left useless unless employed on a job or engaged in consumption...We lose… — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
“Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on… — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be… — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
The new experience that has replaced dignified suffering is artificially prolonged, opaque, depersonalized maintenance. — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
Losses of a kind of satisfaction that have no market equivalent don't show up in the calculations of economists. — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends upon knowing that… — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education. — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn? — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
The pupil is ... 'schooled' to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to… — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another. — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
Societies in which most people depend for most of their goods and services on the personal whim, kindness, or skill of another are called… — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
“P3- modernised poverty combines the lack of power over circumstances with a loss of personal potency” — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
“Today, one must either be isolated and cut off, or a carefully guarded, affluent drop-out, to allow one's children to play in an environment… — Ivan Illich Copy Share Image
