In Memoriam

by Chris Mercogliano

It's been more than a year since Ivan Illich slipped quietly away, his death drawing little more notice than did the latter stages of his career, despite his being one of the most seminal and provocative thinkers of the twentieth century.

Illich is best known for a series of four books published in the 1970s: Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, Energy and Equity, and Medical Nemesis. Each in turn aimed a spotlight at the tendency of our major social institutions to produce effects that are the opposite of their stated mission. For instance, instead of educating everyone, the system of public schools ends up as one "that produces dropouts—a lottery in which those who don't make it not only lose what they pay in, but are stigmatized as inferior for the rest of their lives."

Illich chose to begin with an analysis of education because of the way it grooms us to interact with everything else. Here he introduced the still in vogue notion of the "hidden curriculum," by which he meant that education, through its endless rituals and rewards, "schools" our very minds into believing that we need teachers in order to learn, doctors in order to be healthy, and automobiles and superhighways in order to get from place to place. Modern-day education has been turned into a commodity, Illich warned, and the more of it we consume, the more dependent we become on experts and special programs for the knowledge and skills we need to realize our dreams. That simply stated paradox grows larger every minute.

I won't apologize for this wistful burst of hero worship because, in these days of shameless doublespeak, there is a greater need than ever for people who can see through illusion and artifice, straight to the core. Ivan Illich was one such individual—a radical in the truest sense of the word. He traced ideas back to their roots, using an uncanny historical acuity to pinpoint when and why major shifts in human activity occurred.

Throughout his life Illich practiced what he preached, which I had the good fortune of experiencing firsthand one weekend at Penn State University. What many don't know is that, in addition to his official weekly seminar, he led—on the floor of his office—an informal Saturday morning class that was open to anyone at no charge.

Illich envisioned a society that is "convivial"—from the Latin for "banquet"—one in which knowledge is freely available, education is the pursuit of wisdom and not a means for getting ahead, and the primary tools are those that give a person "the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision."

To create such a world, Illich argued, we must first liberate learning from the institutional monopoly that now controls it. For, as he wrote in Tools for Conviviality, "The transformation of learning into education paralyzes man's poetic ability, his power to endow the world with his personal meaning. Man will wither away just as much if he is deprived of nature, of his own work, or of his deep need to learn what he wants and not what others have planned that he should learn."

Ivan, you will be missed.



Deschooling Society		The Directory of Democratic Education



Everywhere All the Time		How to Grow a School



In Defense of Childhood		Making It Up as We Go Along



Teaching the Restless