Ivan Illich, 1926-2002: brilliant critic of Western institutions

Ivan Illich was born in Vienna, Austria, and grew up in Europe, where he obtained degrees in history, philosophy and theology. In 1950 he came to New York, and worked for years as a priest in an Irish-Puerto Rican neighborhood.

Subsequently Illich spent a number of years in Central and South America experiencing first hand the effects of a dominant dependent relationship between the developed North and the exploited South, which reflected the individual relationships between those with power and those without power in New York. A profoundly analytical person, Illich searched for ways to overcome that which alienates us from each other and from society.

He founded the Intercultural Documentation Center in Cuernevaca, Mexico, in 1961 as a halfway house, where thousand of North Americans have been initiated in understanding Latin American realities and culture. It was hoped that through this process a beginning could be made to eradicate the myths, which had permeated North American understanding through Hollywood stereotypes and uncritical educational practices. Illich dramatically burst onto the American intellectual scene with his analysis of institutionalized education in his books, Deschooling Society, Celebration of Awareness and After Deschooling What? (1971). Pilgrims from all the world came to study at the Cuernevaca Centre and Illich in turn was invited to North American campuses, attracting large audiences.

Illich is most widely known as an author, whose acute analyses reveal the way our modern institutions separate individuals from their humanness and produce disharmony in the world. His books, The Right To Useful Unemployment (1978), Gender (1982), Toward a History of Needs (1987), ABC, Alphabetisation Of The Popular Mind (1988), addressed diverse themes. Here are a few gems from his pen.

"In Vietnam a people on bicycles and armed with sharpened bamboo sticks, brought to a standstill the most advanced machinery for research and production ever devised. We must seek survival in a Third World in which human ingenuity can peacefully outwit machined might."

"Schools have lost their unquestioned claim to educational legitimacy. All over the world, schools are organized enterprises designed to established order, whether this order is called revolutionary, conservative or evolutionary."

"The hidden curriculum teaches all that economically valuable knowledge is the result of professional teaching and that social entitlements depend on the rank achieved in a bureaucratic process. The hidden curriculum transforms the explicit curriculum into a commodity and makes its acquisition the most secure path to wealth and the key to power and privilege. "

"School is the initiation ritual to a society oriented toward the progressive consumption of new satisfactions."

Ivan Illich, one of world's great thinkers, died December 2, 2002.

Hank Zyp writes from Spruce Grove, Alberta.

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