“A major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching.” ~ Ivan Illich
“In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.” ~ Ivan Illich
“Most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only in so far as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.” ~ Ivan Illich
“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.” ~ Ivan Illich
“Schools themselves pervert the natural inclination to grow and learn into the demand for instruction.” ~ Ivan Illich [Deschooling Society]
“Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.” ~ Ivan Illich
“The public is indoctrinated to believe that skills are valuable and reliable only if they are the result of formal schooling.” ~ Ivan Illich [Deschooling Society]
“The university graduate has been schooled for selective service among the rich of the world.” ~ Ivan Illich [Deschooling Society]
“Everywhere not only education but society as a whole needs deschooling.” ~ Ivan Illich [Deschooling Society]
“School prepares people for the alienating institutionalization of life, by teaching the necessity of being taught. Once this lesson is learned, people loose their incentive to develop independently." ~ Ivan Illich
“The pupil is… ‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.” ~ Ivan Illich
“Learning is the human activity that least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful activity.” ~ Ivan Illich
Since there is now more information outside the schools than inside, we should close the schools." ~ Ivan Illich [Deschooling] “Why spend the child’s time inside a school, giving him answers, that already exist outside?”
“The world-wide discrimination against the autodidact has vitiated many people’s confidence in determining their own goals and needs. But the same discrimination has also resulted in a multiplicity of growing minorities who are infuriated by this insidious dispossession.” ~ Ivan Illich (The Right to Useful Unemployment and Its Professional Enemies)
“The right of free assembly has been politically recognized and culturally accepted. We should now understand that this right is curtailed by laws that make some forms of assembly obligatory. This is especially the case with institutions which conscript according to age group, class, or sex, and which are very time-consuming. The army is one example. School is an even more outrageous one.” ~ Ivan Illich [Deschooling Society]
“Skill teachers are made scarce by the belief in the value of licenses. Certification constitutes a form of market manipulation and is plausible only to a schooled mind. Most teachers of arts and trades are less skillful, less inventive, and less communicative than the best craftsmen and tradesmen. Most high-school teachers of Spanish or French do not speak the language as correctly as their pupils might after half a year of competent drills. Experiments conducted by Angel Quintero in Puerto Rico suggest that many young teen-agers, if given the proper incentives, programs, and access to tools, are better than most schoolteachers at introducing their peers to the scientific exploration of plants, stars, and matter, and to the discovery of how and why a motor or a radio functions.” ~ Ivan Illich [Deschooling Society]
“Institutional wisdom tells us that children need school. Institutional wisdom tells us that children learn in school. But this institutional wisdom is itself the product of schools because sound common sense tells us that only children can be taught in school. Only by segregating human beings in the category of childhood could we ever get them to submit to the authority of a schoolteacher.” ~ Ivan Illich [Deschooling Society]
“Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.” ~ Ivan Illich [Deschooling Society]