American - Sociologist | September 4, 1926 - December 2, 2002
So persuasive is the power of the institutions we have created that they shape not only our preferences but actually our sense of possibilities.
Ivan Illich
PowerPossibilitiesPersuasiveShape
We have become unable to think of better education except in terms of more complex schools and of teachers trained for ever longer periods.
EducationThinkBetterBecomeMore
Huge institutions producing costly services dominate the horizons of our inventiveness.
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Tools can rule men sooner than they expect; the plow makes man the lord of the garden but also the refugee from the dust bowl.
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The telephone lets anybody say what he wants to the person of his choice; he can conduct business, express love, or pick a quarrel. It is impossible for bureaucrats to define what people say to each other on the phone, even though they can interfere with - or protect - the privacy of their exchange.
LoveBusinessPeopleImpossibleSay
By the early seventeenth century, a new consensus began to arise: the idea that man was born incompetent for society and remained so unless he was provided with 'education.'
EducationManSocietyEarlyBorn
I consider the indiscriminate propagation of self-help to be morally unacceptable... self-help is the opposite of autonomous or vernacular life.
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Up to now, economic development has always meant that people, instead of doing something, are enabled to buy it... Economic development has also meant that, after a time, people must buy the commodity because the conditions under which they could get along without it had disappeared from their physical, social, or cultural environment.
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I've nothing against schools! I'm against compulsory schooling.
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The college and university systems, at least, have become like television. There's a bit of this and a bit of that and some compulsory program with its components connected in a way that only a planner could understand.
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I didn't want to go into the papal bureaucracy, so I thought of doing a postdoctoral thesis, which they call a 'Habilitation' in German universities, on alchemy in the work of Albert the Great.
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The idea of Homo monolinguis - one-languaged man - the idea of children having to grow into one system before we confuse them with another mental system, is an idea with which, unfortunately, many people are brought up now.
ChildrenManPeopleGrowNowSystem
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