Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals. Ivan Illich More Quotes by Ivan Illich More Quotes From Ivan Illich 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.' Ivan Illich new man society education I consider the indiscriminate propagation of self-help to be morally unacceptable... self-help is the opposite of autonomous or vernacular life. Ivan Illich self-help opposite autonomous life 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. Ivan Illich doing environment time people I've nothing against schools! I'm against compulsory schooling. Ivan Illich schools against nothing schooling Schools that are freely accessible allow the organization of certain specific learning tasks which a person might propose to himself. Schools, when they are compulsory - as we see at this moment in the United States - create a dazed population, a 'learned' population, a mentally pretentious population, such as we have never seen before. Ivan Illich never moment learning organization 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. Ivan Illich understand college television way 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. Ivan Illich doing thought great work 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. Ivan Illich grow man children people Most people, throughout history, haven't learned one language to the exclusion of another. You learn to speak differently to a peasant and to a shoemaker. You speak differently to your mother, who comes from Burgundy, and to your father, who comes from Swabia. Ivan Illich you mother father history
