Ivan Illich

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).
For the novella, see The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich (Vienna, September 4, 1926 - Bremen, December 2, 2002) was an Austrian philosopher and anarchist social critic, whose polemics on various forms of professional authority earned him worldwide notoriety. Author of an informal series of critiques of the institutions of "modern" culture, he addressed issues such as education, medicine, work, energy use, economic development, and gender. His work was most widely known in the 1970s, yet today is hard to find, and not part of the academic canon.

Contents

[edit] Personal life

Illich was born in Vienna to a Croatian father and Sephardic-Jewish mother. He studied histology and crystallography at Florence University.

From 1942 to 1946, Illich studied theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in the Vatican. He wrote a dissertation with a focus on the historian Arnold J. Toynbee, and would return to that subject in his later years. In the 1950s he asked to be assigned as an assistant parish priest in New York City. In 1956 he was appointed vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. There Illich met Everett W. 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 that motivated the global rising tide of industrial development. He viewed such emissaries 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 CIDOC's critical analysis of the institutional actions of the Church brought the CIDOC into conflict with the Vatican. Illich was called to Rome to be questioned. In 1976, apparently concerned by the influx of formal academics and possible side-effects of its own "institutionalization," Illich, with consent from its members, shut the center down. 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.

[edit] Deschooling Society

His most celebrated work remains Deschooling Society (1971), a critical discourse on education as practiced in "modern" economies. Full of detail on then-current programs 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 institutionalized 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 institutionalization of education is considered to tend towards the institutionalization of society, and conversely that ideas for de-institutionalizing education may be a starting point for a de-institutionalized 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. Particularly striking is his call (in 1971) for the use of advanced technology to support "learning webs." His description of these webs was prophetic in many ways, relating to current uses and ideals of Wikipedia, Craigslist and of the Internet more generally. For example, Illich says, "The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity."

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../i/v/a/Ivan_Illich_cbb3.html"