Education Resources

April 21, 2006

Ivan Illich

Filed under: Education — @ 8:55 am

Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich

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Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich (Vienna, September 4, 1926 - Bremen, December 2, 2002), polymath, polemicist.

Author of an informal series of polemical critiques of the institutions of ‘modern’ culture, he addressed issues from education to medicine to work to energy use and economic development to gender. His work rose to immense popularity in the 1970’s, yet today is not often found in the mainstream academic canon.

Contents

Personal life

Born in Vienna to a family of Jewish-Catholic Croatian roots, whence they were forced to flee in 1941, he studied histology and crystallography at Florence University.

From 1932 to 1946 he studied theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in the Vatican. He wrote a dissertation with a focus on historian, Arnold Toynbee. This field is one to which he describes himself returning to in his latter career. In the 1950’s he asked to be assigned as a parish priest in New York City. In 1956 he was appointed vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. Illich at this time met Everett Reimer, and the two began to analyze their own function as “educational” leaders. In 1961 Illich founded the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC) at Cuernavaca in Mexico, ostensibly a research centre offering language courses to missionaries from North America. However, his intent was to counterfoil the Vatican’s participation in the “modern development” of the so-called Third World. Illich believed that the Third World, in its under-development, should be viewed with envy. He looked askance at the liberal pity or conservative imperiousness which motivated the global rising tide of industrial development. He viewed such emmisaries as a form of industrial hegemony, and as such, an act of “war on subsistence”. He sought to teach “missionaries” dispatched by the Church to rather identify themselves as tourists and guests of the host country.

After 10 years, the analytic and critical stance of CIDOC on the institutional actions of the Church began to bring the institution into conflict with the Vatican. He was called to Rome to be questioned. In 1976, Illich, apparently concerned by the influx of formal academics and possible side-effects of its own ‘institutionalization’, shut the alternative center down, with the consent of its members. Several members subsequently continued language schools in Cuernavaca, some of which still exist. Illich himself resigned as a priest in the late 1960s.

From the 1980s, Ivan Illich traveled extensively, mainly splitting his time between the United States, Mexico, and Germany. He held an appointment as Visiting Professor of Philosophy and of Science, Technology, and Society at Penn State, and also taught at the University of Bremen.

During his later years, he suffered from a cancerous growth on his face that, in accordance with his critique of professionalized medicine, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to treat with traditional methods. He regularly smoked opium to deal with the pain caused by this tumor. At an early stage, he consulted a doctor about having the tumor removed, but there was too great a chance of losing his ability to speak, he was told, so he lived with the tumor as best he could. “My mortality,” he called it.

Philosophy

Deschooling Society

His most celebrated work remains Deschooling Society (1971), a critical discourse on education as practised in ‘modern’ economies. Full of detail on then current programmes and concerns, the book can seem dated, but its core assertions and propositions remain as radical today as they were at the time. Giving real-world examples of the ineffectual nature of institutionalised education, Illich posited self-directed education, supported by intentional social relations, in fluid, informal arrangements:

Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue’s responsibility until it engulfs his pupils’ lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education–and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries.[1]

The last sentence makes clear what the title suggests - that the institutionalisation of education is considered to tend towards the institutionalisation of society, and conversely that ideas for de-institutionalising education may be a starting point for a de-institutionalised society. And this is where the true radicalism of the ideas becomes clear. As a holistic thinker, with a formidable intellect and a truly catholic breadth of erudition, Illich always considers his insights in the widest possible terms.

The book is more than a critique - it contains positive suggestions for a reinvention of learning throughout society and throughout every individual lifetime. Of particular relevance here is his call (from a 1971 perspective) for the use of advanced technology to support “learning webs”. Many characteristics of these as described relate strongly to the nature and use of the WWW in general, and strongly to the workings and ideals of Wikipedia.

Quotations

  • Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.
  • People need new tools to work with rather than new tools that “work” for them.
  • Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings.
  • Not only what men do but also what men want is designated by a noun. ‘Housing’ designates a commodity rather than an activity. People acquire knowledge, mobility, even sensitivity or health. They have not only work or fun but even sex.
  • I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope can be tied it is hospitality. A practice of hospitality recovering threshold, table, patience, listening, and from there generating seedbeds for virtue and friendship on the one hand. On the other hand radiating out for possible community, for rebirth of community..

Bibliography

  • Celebration of Awareness (1971) ISBN 0714508373
  • Deschooling Society (1971) ISBN 0060121394 ISBN 0060121394 ISBN 0060803818
  • Tools for Conviviality (1973) ISBN 0060803088 ISBN 0060121386
  • Energy and Equity (1974) ISBN 0061361535 ISBN 0060803274
  • Medical Nemesis (1976) ISBN 0394712455 ISBN 0714510955 ISBN 0714510963
  • Toward a History of Needs (1978) ISBN 0394410408 ISBN 0394735013
  • Shadow Work (1981) ISBN 0714527114 ISBN 0714527106
  • Gender (1982) ISBN 0394527321
  • H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness (1985) ISBN 0911005064
  • ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1988) ISBN 0865472912
  • In the Mirror of the Past (1992) ISBN 0714529370
  • In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon (1993) ISBN 0226372359
  • Ivan Illich in Conversation interviews with Cayley, David. (1992) (Toronto: Anansi Press).
  • The Rivers North of the Future - The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley (2005) ISBN 0887847145 (Toronto: Anansi Press)
  • Corruption of Christianity Illich, Ivan (Author) Cayley, David (Editor) (2000) ISBN 0660180995

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