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ABSTRACT

DESCHOOLING AND RETOOLING: AN EXAMINATION
OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF IVAN ILLICH WITH
PARTICULAR EMPHASIS ON HIS ANALYSIS
OF THE STRUCTURES OF SOCIETY

BY

Lucille C. Bruch

The educational criticism of Ivan Illich has
occupied an important position in recent dialogue about
educational reform. He is the chief advocate of the
approach to reform that is lumped under therubric of
"deschooling." Illich's work centers upon the notion that
the development and organization of society in the United
States is mirrored directly in the development and organiza-
tion of its schools. For Illich, the history of the school
system in the United States is concurrently a history of
American culture and economy. His critique of schooling,
then, is an analytic tool for the examination of the
general problem of social reform and its relationship to
social structure. This study has paid particular attention
to Illich's conception of social structure, to the claims
he has made about his own stance as a social philosopher and
to the relationship between his educational proposals and.

his social thought. Particularly important has been the

Lucille C. Bruch

question of whether, in the detailing of his social
philosophy, Illich has developed a consistent and
reasonably rigorous notion of the character of social
structure. A

In general, Illich's social theory is, in conven-
tional terms, materialistic and structural. That is, he
argues that human behavior is generated by the material
conditions of life, that reform must take place in material
conditions, and that the character of society is determined
more importantly by the inevitable outcomes of manifest
social structure than by the content activities of those
structures. This position, which has much in common with
both Marx and philosophical anarchists, such as Kropotkin,
incorporates, at least to a degree the historical distinc-
tion between "communitarian" and "institutional" (gemein-
schaft and gesellschaft) forms of social organization.
Although Illich's commitment to a religious, at least
nominally Catholic, point of view tempers his materialism,
the qualitative distinction between communities and
institutions is a pivotal component of his social thought.
This study has asked Whether his utilization of that
distinction has been clear and consistent.

The conclusion of the study argues that, while the
ideology of deschooling cannot be comprehended fully from
Illich's writings to date, he fails, finally, to justify-

the disestablishment of schools on the ground of his social

Lucille C. Bruch

theory. Instead, his justification ultimately rests on
emotional and vaguely humanistic grounds.

The underlying premise of Illich's criticism.is
that the dominant institutions of a society determine and
shape the schools; therefore, an alteration of those
institutions would effect a corresponding change in the
schools. However, the change Illich seems to be proposing
is one of the behavior of the institutions through political
participation and not in the structural forms of institu-
tions themselves. By uncritically amalgamating the two
elements of structure and substance, Illich has devitalized

the case for deschooling and retooling.

DESCHOOLING AND RETOOLING: AN EXAMINATION
OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF IVAN ILLICH WITH
PARTICULAR EMPHASIS ON HIS ANALYSIS
OF THE STRUCTURES OF SOCIETY

BY

Lucille C. Bruch

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Secondary Education and Curriculum

1974

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This, like all doctoral dissertations, embodies the
contribution of a great many people. Special thanks is
extended to Dr. Marvin Grandstaff, the chairman of my
committee and director of the thesis; to Dr. George Ferree,
committee member from Philosophy of Education; to Dr. Dale
Alam, committee member from the College of Education; and
to Dr. Lewis Zerby, committee member from the Department
of Philosophy. Dr. George Barnett is also acknowledged for

having been kind enough to read the thesis.

ii

.flEi is:

_ influfi.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter
I. HISTORICAL CONTEXT .
II. THE DEVELOPMENT OF ILLICH'S THOUGHT
III. CONTEMPORARY MYTHOLOGY: ITS SIGNIFICANCE
AND SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR ITS EXTIRPATION
IV. COMMUNITY AND INSTITUTION: THEIR
DISTINCTIONS AND RAMIFICATIONS FOR
CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY . .
V. ILLICH, THE SOCIAL CRITIC: REVOLUTIONARY
OR REFORMER? . . . . . . .
REFERENCES .

iii

Page

14

38

60

78

95

CHAPTER I

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

"A real pleasure this is," I heard another millicent
goloss say as I was tolchocked very rough and skorry into
the auto. "Little Alex all to our own selves." I creeched
out:

"I'm blind, Bog bust and bleed you, you grahzny
bastards."

"Language, language," like smecked a goloss, and then I
got a like backhand tolchock with some ringy rooker or other
full on the rot. I said:

"Bog murder you, you vonny stinking bratchnies. Where
are the others? Where are my stinking traitorous droogs?
One of my cursed grahzny bratties chained me on the glazzies.

- Anthony Burgess

The dark vision of Anthony Burgess, a vision of
dehumanization and impersonality so profound that a lan-
guage must be invented to describe the atrocities of every-
day life, seems, as Orwell's did, extreme, at least at
first glance. And yet, Burgess and Orwell, Huxley, and the
rest share a methodology of extrapolation from existing
conditions. Their soul-chilling fantasies are grown from
the seeds of the present. When we take seriously the grim
potentials of our world, we become aware of the importance,
indeed, the necessity, of understanding as fully as we can
the pathologies of our social organization.

The development and organization of society in the
United States is mirrored directly in the development and

1

organization of its schools. The history of the school
system in the United States is concurrently a history of
American culture and economy. The goals of American
society, from preparing a few for the clergy to racing
rockets with Russia, have all been reflected in our
schools. When the conditions of life change, there are
always major changes in the rhetoric about schools, and
sometimes significant changes in curricula and pedagogy.
In recent years, the evolution of pre-schools, the new
math, and career centers within the school system are
examples of such changes.

There is little question that important alterations
in the conditions of life are now taking place. In
response to these alterations, new rhetoric, along with
proposals for changes in practice, are emerging. This
study examines one body of rhetoric and proposals, that of
Ivan Illich, with a view to outlining Illich's treatment
of an issue that is critical to any social-economic-
educational theory. That issue is the relationship between
man's ways of living and the institutions that support and
sometimes control his life. Illich, like many theorists,
does not always address the issue directly, and in the
pages that follow, an attempt will be made to analyze, to
delineate, and to criticize his position on this relation-

ship.

The appearance of the views of Illich and others
has not happened out of a void. It is part of a continuous
developmental and emerging pattern of some antiquity.
Without making any claim to presenting a comprehensive
historical review, it may be of some value to establish a
context for the examination of Illich's thought, by briefly
outlining some major developments in educational rhetoric
and practice that have occurred in recent years as a
response to changes in living conditions.

During the past fifty years, the realization that
the school represented our vision of reality has given rise
to critics of education who have taken the school as an
institutional paradigm of society's illnesses and failures.1
Within the system of schooling, these critics have seen the
dynamics of failure at work--fai1ure not only of the system
to achieve the goals it has set for itself, but failure,
too, of those individuals trapped within the vise of the
system itself, which in the United States includes almost
everyone from the age of six through sixteen, and nearly
half of the population through age twenty-two.

John Dewey's concern with not only wha£_we think
but how we think had, of course, a major impact on the
organization of schools in the first half of the 20th

century. Progressive education sought to enable students

 

1A parallel program has been followed by those, such as
historians Lawrence Cremin and Merle Curti who find in schools an
image of general progress.

to learn to think critically and, therefore, to deal more
effectively with the reality of living in this world.
Unfortunately, Dewey's complex thesis was distorted and
simplified into lukewarm banalities by some of his
followers, and it was this set of distortions that found
its way into the school's curriculum.

When the Russians launched Sputnik I in 1957, a new
phase of educational criticism was initiated, a phase
denigrating Dewey as a romantic philosopher whose ideas
spawned students inept in discipline, rigorous thinking,
and rocketry.

Moreover, progressive education was championed by know-

nothing education professors and had taken over as the

dominant philosophy of American schools. As a result,

our country had been burdened with at least two genera-

tions of self-indulgent ignoramuses--specifically, kids

who had no stomach or preparation for building rockets

and other important things. And that's why we were

losing to the Russians.
A return to "the basics" was advocated because, after all,
what was the function of schools anyway if not to train
physicists, engineers, chemists, etc.? These were the kind

of men American society needed if we were to maintain our

world rank of numero uno.

 

This most important and fundamental philosophical
question of "what are schools for" was unfortunately not

adequately discussed. Alternative theories were not

 

2Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, "A Careful Guide to the

School Squabble," Psychology deay, October, 1973, p. 76.

posited nor debated. In fact, the question was simply a
rhetorical one of the times; everyone knew the answer
before the question was articulated. Schools were an
important part of our country's defense against others;
schools were necessary to train the personnel we needed to
maintain our national superiority. If there were any con-
flicting views as to what our schools were for in the late
fifties, they were labeled left wing and subversive, and
the espouser risked ramifications not entirely pleasant by
articulating them.

By 1960 the threat of immediate Soviet domination
had diminished and the educational reformers began asking
what merit teaching a specific subject had. Why teach.math
or history or sociology? The answer agreed upon by most of
the academicians and educational experts was that subjects
were taught so that the students might learn how to think;
thus, "new" math, "new" history, and "new" sociology came
into being. Students in elementary schools received new
sets of books, university campuses exploded with teachers
taking summer courses in the "new" methodologies, and
parents signed up for night-time seminars so that they,
too, could feel comfortable with the language of the new
technologies. The goals for society had shifted again.

There were those, however, who believed that the
basic question of "what are schools for" had never been

fully discussed. If schools were to teach people to think,

then why was the drop-out rate increasing so rapidly? Why
were the students who survived their ten or more years of
schooling becoming so alienated and trouble-causing? Men
like Paul Goodman and Edgar Friedenberg said it was because
schools were not established to teach people to think but
rather to teach passivity and acceptance of outwardly
imposed goals and purposes. Innovations such as "new" math
were only a subtrafuge to keep students from.thinking about
and evaluating the paradox of their own predicament within
and outside of the educational institutions. Goodman

States:

. . . our abundant society is at present simply deficient
in many of the most elementary objective opportunities and
worth-while goals that could make growing up possible. It
is lacking in honest public speech, and people are not
taken seriously. It is lacking in the opportunity to be
useful. It thwarts aptitude and creates stupidity. It
corrupts ingenuous patriotism. It corrupts the fine arts.
It shackles science. It dampens animal ardor. It dis-
courages the religious convictions of Justification and
Vocation and it dims the sense that there is a Creation.
It has no Honor. It has no Community.3

In an era when technological improvements seemed to
be reaching a zenith, these men and others complained of
the waste of human resources, the waste of humanity itself.

In our society, bright lively children, with the poten-
tiality for knowledge, noble ideals, honest effort, and
some kind of worth-while achievement, are transformed
into useless and cynical bipeds, or decent young men
trapped or early resigned, whether in or out of the
organized system.4

 

3Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (New York: Vintage Books,-
1960), p. 12.

4Ibid., p. 14.

One does not have to share Goodman's ideology to
perceive that contemporary society gives every evidence of
friction and cacophony as one individual collides with
another in their separate struggles of existence. Instead
of the harmonious sound of many different instruments
striving for the same goal in a symphony, contemporary man
emits sounds of dissonance and suffering as his life is
increasingly characterized by discord and alienation.
Modern society can no longer be defined by Webster as an
organized group working together because of common beliefs
and interests. Modern American society is made up of
individuals who are in conflict with each other because
their goals are not common ones; we no longer share even a
majority of common beliefs and interests, and as a result
of this disparity, our individual and collective goals are
becoming increasingly specialized.

It has become acceptable to view this disparity in
goals as the result of the difference of being a part of
the industrial age as opposed to existing in the electronic
age. Marshall McLuhan has stated:

In the electric age, when our central nervous system is
technologically extended to involve us in the whole of
mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us,

we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences
of our every action.

 

5Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of
.Man (New York: The New American Library, Inc., 1964), p. 20.

The collision of one kind of technology (industrial) with
another (electronic) led McLuhan to his belief that the
essential characteristic of our time is its revulsion
against already imposed patterns. McLuhan's war cry of
"the medium is the message" has been quoted by many to
explain electronics as the extension of human senses.
Because the media are extensions of man himself, McLuhan
believes they also help create the culture of any group.
The extensions thus become the initiators.

Out of these changing conditions new rhetoric
emerged concerning cultural and educational phenomena.
Historically, as has been briefly noted, a change in the
material conditions of a society will result in an adapta-
tion of that society's educational patterns. Two separate
theories were represented in this new rhetoric. One was
aimed at altering the structure of the educational patterns
in the belief that those changes which can be made in the
technical-economic arrangements of a society will result in
the generation of significant changes in both the social
organization and the ideology of that society. This I call
the structuralist view. The other position attempts to
change the content of educational activity, believing that
changes in the ideology of a society will produce the
desired modifications of that society's material conditions
and social arrangements. This I call the substantive view.

Both operate from the claim that schools are not the only

organizations which mirror our society but that the school
system can be used effectively as an example of contemporary
culture. Both positions decry the deification of technology
at the expense of humanity, and both advocate the rights of
the individual to live his life as he sees fit with autonomy,
creativity, and dignity.

The substantive view emphasizes alterations within
the existing structure; indeed it accepts the existing
structure as a "given” and perceived problems arising from
a malfunction of that given. Thus, Charles Silberman
advocates changes in curriculum.and regulations within the
school in order to secure the rights of the student.

Hence the content of the curriculum cannot be left to chance;'
education is a process that cannot be separated from what it
is that one learns. The transcendent objective, to be sure,
is not mastery of a body of knowledge per se, it is, in
Jerome Bruner's formulation, 'to create a better or happier
or more courageous or more sensitive or more honest man.‘
But other institutions also have that goal, among them the
family and the church. The raison d'etre of the school--
society's ultimate justification for creating a separate,
formal, educational institution, and for making prolonged
exposure to it compulsory--is the conviction (the faith, if
you will), that, as Bruner also puts it, 'The conduct of
life is not independent of what it is that one knows' nor
'of how it is that one has learned what one knows.‘6

For the students to make some sense out of their scholastic
experience, Silberman states:

. . . it is not just the curriculum that will have to

change, but the entire way in which high schools are

organized and run . . . . Fortunately, there are signs of
change, in part as a response to student dissent, in part

 

6Charles Silberman, Crisis in the Classroom (New York:
Vintage Books, 1971), p. 325.

10

as a result of the growing distaste a number of teachers and

administrators feel for the way schools are run, and their

conviction that schools can be more humane, that students

can handle and benefit from greater freedom and responsibility.

Whatever the reasons, there would appear to be a growing

ferment in high schools around the country.
I have quoted this view at length because it is the domi-
nant one in America today; dominant not only in educational
and cultural areas but also in technological and economic
and political arenas as well. More and more funding is
legislated for school reform-~more schools, more certified
teachers, updated textbooks, more free periods with a
greater selection of subjects. According to the reformist
perspective, these are a few of the changes which will
result in a better education for young people. The time
spent by the student within the framework of the school day
should be relevant to his or her needs; perhaps the student
should even venture into his society more frequently, or
members of society might become visiting lecturers in their
specialties at the school. The content may be stretched,
bent, or altered in a variety of ways to meet the demands
for a reform of curriculum--a change in educational
ideology--but the structure of the educational pattern,
that is the school, remains constant.

The structuralist perspective is comprehensive and

"radical" because it bases its critique in the dysfunction,

and its reform program in the alteration, of existing

 

71bid, pp. 336-337.

11

total social structures. This view is espoused by Goodman
and Herbert Marcuse, among others. According to these
critics, legislation is not enough to return to man his
autonomy, his power over his own destiny. An alienated
corporation can produce only alienated people who in turn
contribute to an unholy and alienated soCiety. These
critics do not believe, however, that the situation is
hopeless but rather that what is called for is an altera-
tion of the existing frameworks, the structures of our
society, and not merely a change in the educational sub-
stance within those frameworks.

All the material and intellectual forces which could be put

to work for the realization of a free society are at hand.

That they are not used for that purpose is to be attributed

to the total mobilization of existing society against its

own potential for liberation. But this situation in no way

makes the radical transformation itself a utopia.

This "mobilization of existing society against its
own potential for liberation" is the phenomenon that
Goodman depicts when he states that:

In advanced countries, indeed, it is science and technology
themselves that have gradually, and finally triumphantly,
become the system of mass faith, not disputed by various

political ideologies and nationalisms that have also had
religious uses.9

 

8Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970),
p. 64.

9Paul Goodman, New Refbrmation: Notes of a Neolithic Con-
servative (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 46.

12

The results of social and technological forms become the
premises of social thought when the forms of a culture
finally determine the essentials of that culture itself.

Of those critics who claim to attack contemporary
society from the perspective of structure, Ivan Illich is
representative of an identifiable and distinctive view.

It is distinctive in the sense that although its taxonomy
of society's failures is similar to Goodman's and Marcuse's,
Illich's conclusions are quite different.

"I want to raise the general question of the mutual
definition of man's nature and the nature of modern insti-
"10

tutions which characterizes our world view and language.

In his two major works to date, DeschoolingSocietyand

 

Tools for Conviviality, and in numerous magazine articles,

 

Illich has attempted to do just that.

In order to examine the theories posited by Illich
concerning man's relationship to his environment, this
study will present a biographical sketch, a statement
describing the predominant positions to which Illich
adheres, and a specific examination of perhaps the single
most significant question for a structuralist posture--the
relationship between communitarian and institutional forms
of social organization. This investigation of two types of

social arrangements, their distinctions and the

 

10Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper and
Row, 1971), p. 2.

13

ramifications of such differences, will be undertaken with
a view to explicating the specific position of Illich on
not only these two types of social arrangements but on the
central and encompassing question of whether Illich's

claims to be a structuralist are justified.

CHAPTER II

THE DEVELOPMENT OF ILLICH'S THOUGHT

It is a source of wonderment that you should feature an
article like Ivan Illich's.

Twenty-three years of teaching experience should have
enabled me to grasp, at least in part, the anfractuous
nomenclature and devious reasoning of the author. But
I must admit that the writing emerges as a prolix exercise
in futility. The rambling references to the "social
structure," "bureaucratic politics," and "technocratic
restraint" become unintelligible.

As for the conclusion that "the certification of
teachers now constitutes an undue restraint on the right
to free speech," this can be regarded as not merely an
affront to our profession but a misguided invitation to
chaos.

- N. R. Feigin
He is a man for all seasons, a man who transcends

particularities of time, place, and ideology.
— Peter Schrag

Ivan Illich was born on September 4, 1926, in

Vienna, although his family's home was Split in Dalmatia.

His father, a Roman Catholic, who came from a titled

Dalmatian family, had been a wealthy engineer and land-

owner in prewar Germany; his mother's family were Sephardic

Jews who moved to Germany from.Spain. Early in his atten-

dance at school in Austria, Illich was expelled because of

his mother's Jewish heritage. During the war, he attended

14

15

the University of Florence where he did research in
crystallography, developing a method of discerning blood
types from their crystallographic formation. This intense
interest in science appears frequently in Illich's
references to the parallels between alchemy and education.

Historically, faith in education grew out of alchemy.

Education is the alchemist's elixir in modern form.

It is the mystical stone whose mere touch can refine

the base elements of the world, the procedure by which

ordinary metals are forced through successive stages

until they emerge as pure gold.1
Illich also evidences a critical preoccupation with the
deification of science and the resulting institutionaliza-
tion of human values and concerns.

By the age of twenty-four, Illich had earned a
doctorate in history from Salzburg University, where his
dissertation topic was Toynbee's philosophy of history, and
several other degrees in philosophy and theology from the
Gregorian University in Rome. After his ordination to the
Catholic priesthood, the Vatican wanted to send him to the
Collegio di Nobili Ecclesiastici, "where gifted linguists
and intellectuals are prepared for high-ranking careers
in the Church's diplomatic corps."2 However, as was to

appear characteristic of Illich in later years, he felt

the need to test himself against a greater challenge, and

1Ivan Illich, "Education: A Consumer Commodity and a Pseudo-
Religion," The Christian Century, LXXXVIII (December 15, 1971), 1464.

2Francine du Plessix Gray, "Profiles: The Rules of the
Game," The New YOrker, XLVI (April 25, 1970), 43.

16

he accepted instead, after actively seeking the position,
an assignment to an obscure parish in a predominantly
Irish section of New York City. The parish had recently
experienced a large influx of Puerto Rican immigrants.3
His career as a parish priest in New York was a
mercurial one. The Puerto Ricans with whom he worked
idolized him. One of his colleagues, Father Joseph
Connolly has said of Illich and the Pureto Ricans, "He was
Mr. Puerto Rico,their Babe Ruth."4 His efforts to assist
the migrant workers included the establishment of employ-
ment agencies that he persuaded Madison Avenue magnates to
publicize. Sunday camps for Puerto Rican children were
set up, and Illich recruited Irish bus drivers to give up
their Sundays off and drive the children to the country.
However, Illich soon began to cricize the American
Catholic Church for the way it imposed its own bureaucratic
values on the minority groups living in the United States,
particularly the Puerto Ricans. Writing in a theological

journal under the pen name of Peter Canon, Illich stated,

"A critical attitude is precisely one of the areas in which

 

3Although Illich did not speak Spanish when he came to the
United States in 1950, his remarkable linguistic ability combined
with a three weeks' crash course at a Berlitz class enabled him to
converse easily within a month. He has continued this proficiency of
languages, his interest in the history and symbolism of words; when
last questioned on the subject, he stated that he now speaks eleven
languages fluently and has a good reading knowledge of fifteen. [See
John Ohliger and Colleen McCarthy, Lifelong Learning or Lifelong '
Schooling? (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Publications in
Continuing Education and ERIC Clearinghouse on Adult Education, 1971),
p. 3.]

4du Plessix Gray, p. 44.

17

Christian love for the Church can develop."5

Naturally,
this outspoken attitude toward criticism, particularly of
the Church, was not entirely shared by all members of the
hierarchy. I

Illich crusaded against the formalities of the
established Church in order to meet what he viewed as the
real needs of the communicants. His superior at Incarna-
tion Parish stated:

His idea was simply to bring all the Puerto Ricans into

church and make them feel they were wanted. He had the

aristocrat's bread-and-circuses approach to the poor.

I'd say to him, "John, you're getting at them through

their stomachs."
This trend of Illich's to be critical of the manner in
which established organizations met the needs of those
involved in their programs was only in the embryonic stages
in the early fifties, but ten to fifteen years later it
would form the predominant focus for his writings.

During his parish days in New York, Illich
developed a strong bond of friendship with Frances
Cardinal Spellman, a friendship that was to last until
Spellman's death. In 1956 Illich succeeded in having the
celebration of the national feast day for Puerto Ricans,
San Juan's Day, shifted in location from.St. Patrick's
Cathedral to the quadrangle at Fordham University. Cardinal

Spellman was invited to be the'guest of honor, and he

 

5mm.

18

accepted with a challenge that he did not like to play to
empty houses. In what was to prove to be typical Illich
fashion, total involvement or none at all, advertisements
were placed in numerous newspapers, sound trucks blared
the bizarre invitation from street to street. When June
24th arrived, there were thirty-five thousand Puerto
Ricans in attendance, and the headlines of city papers the
next day announced "Crowds Swamp Cardinal, Mayor."

Only months after this illustration of Illich's
recruiting techniques, Cardinal Spellman agreed to appoint
Illich as the vice-rector of the Catholic University of
Puerto Rico, where he was to begin groundwork on a center
to train American priests in Latin American culture. In
1957 Spellman made Illich the youngest monsignor in the
New York archdiocese, and the essays which Illich wrote
now were no longer signed by Peter Canon but by The Very
Reverend Ivan Illich, Ph.D.

The training center which Illich established in
Puerto Rico was called the Institute of Intercultural Com-
munications, and its purpose was "to steep American priests
in various aspects of Puerto Rican and Latin-American
culture, or as a Brooklyn priest put it, 'to stop the
Irish malarkey of imposing our ways on other people.'"7
Illich's methods of indoctrination were often thought

extreme; he had his students live on simple native diets,

 

7rbid., p. 46.

l9

encouraged them to travel by foot or by horseback to the
most remote regions of the island, and demanded from them
a thorough knowledge of local customs and culture. A
friend who lived at the center during these four years has
said that living in the proximity of Ivan Illich was akin
to having a comet by the tail. Neither clocks nor comforts
meant much to Illich, and some priests who came would not
return because of the spartan regime and the unorthodox
brilliance of the man himself.

Politically Illich was becoming more aggressively
critical of the Catholic Church and its seemingly dicta-
torial declarations. In 1960 when a Catholic political
party was founded to defeat the election of the progressive
government of Luis Munoz Marin, Illich quickly attacked
this Catholic position. Marin's party advocated the
adoption of a_birth-control program which opposed the
Church's teachings; furthermore, the bishops of Puerto
Rico threatened excommunication for any Catholic who voted
for Munoz Marin. Frequently speaking out against the
Catholic party both privately and publicly, Illich incurred
the wrath of his immediate superior, and in October, 1960,
Illich was ordered to leave the Ponce diocese. He returned
to New York and was appointed to a position at Fordham
University. (His previous superior, Bishop McManus, was

soon afterward relieved of his own position.)

20

During the year of his appointment to Fordham,
Illich spent much time traveling outside the United States
searching for a place to start a new center for the train-
ing of missionaries. He was becoming increasingly more
alarmed over the American missionary attitude of "just let
me show you how we do it in the United States." He noticed
with dislike and disgust the imitation brick rectories and
Catholic schools mushrooming in the cities of Lima, Quito,
and Buenos Aires.
In 1961 Illich settled on the town of Cuernavaca,
Mexico, and he went to see the Bishop of Cuernavaca,
Sergio Mendez Arceo.
One day, Illich rang the Bishop's doorbell, was ushered
into his study, sat down on his couch, and announced, "I
would like to start, under your auspices, a center of de-
Yankeefication." The two men talked without interruption
for nine hours. Illich settled in Cuernavaca because, he
said, "I found in the Bishop a man for 1e bon ton, le bon
goOt were of supreme importance, a man with whom I could
communicate my own wavelength, I knew from the start that
we could please and surprise each other." The Bishop,
for his part, agreed to sponsor the educational venture
because he found Illich to be "an extraordinary man with
startlingly lucid ideas, who I knew would live in a state
of perpetual renewal."8
Bishop Mendez Arceo later emerged as a leader of the
Second Vatican Council's ultra-progressive ecumenical wing.
Illich's unswerving and self-directed task of
finding a location for such a training or "detraining"

center is evidence of his belief in the inherent right to

 

8l’bid. , p. 49.

21

individual freedom. Illich viewed the American missionaries
who went into Latin American countries as creators of situa-
tions in which individual freedom of the Latin Americans

was being restricted. The missionaries were creating
encounters in which the participants were forced to consume
rather than to create their ownsolutions. The products
they were consuming—-American Christianity, American
Culture, American Standards, American Values—-were presented
as the only alternatives. A predetermined judgment con-
cerning what was to be learned, accepted, and valued had
already been established. This dichotomy between manipula-
tion in order to achieve a material result and an autono-
mous decision to seek a specific goal will be articulated
through much of Illich's later writings.

Illich and two of his friends, Jerry Morris and
Theodoro Stancioff, founded the Center for Intercultural
Formation (CIF) in Cuernavaca in 1961. It consisted of
intensive language training and a program for intercultural
sensitivity development, mostly for missionaries on their
way to Latin America.9 The major topic under consideration
at all times was the reaction of the human personality to
social change.

By 1963-64 the organization that had begun almost

as a club for those interested in social criticism had

 

9Wayne H. Cowan, "An Interview with Ivan Illich," Christianity
and Crisis, XXIX (August, 1969), 217.

22

evolved into a comprehensive research association with an
excellent and expanding library. Small seminars were
started, and a new organization was established called the
Center for Intercultural Documentation, known as CIDOC,
with Ivan Illich as its director. The location of the
Center was moved from an old hotel in the southwestern part
of Cuernavaca which had originally delighted Bishop Mendez
Arceo because of "its spirit of Christian poverty, its so

un-American way of life,"10

to a magnificent villa in the
Rancho Tetela section of the city. This is a hilltop
residential sector which overlooks Cuernavaca. The main
building of the Center now is a U-shaped, white, colonnaded
structure, built around a swimming pool surrounded by pines,
flowers, and shrubbery. The rooms include a few modern
pieces of furniture which have been designed by Illich's
brother, Aleksander, who is an architect.

During the first few years of CIDOC's existence,
the majority of attendants was clerical; the Center had,
after all, been established primarily to provide training
for those assigned to missionary activities in Latin
America. However, one of Illich's primary objectives at
the Center was to discourage those missionaries from
coming whom he felt were unqualified for the life they had

chosen. Many missionaries from the United States evoked a

special wrath in Illich because he believed them.to be

 

10du Plessix Gray, p. 74.

23

agents of American imperialism, knowing little or nothing
of the mores of the people to whom they had been assigned
and not being capable of learning. Such assignments Illich
believed to be dangerous to Latin America. "Only God can
create values. The United States breeds violence by
imposing its values on other nations."11‘
If the Center were becoming more secular, in part
because of the growing number of clerics whom Illich
rejected for admission, the emphasis on social criticism
was not declining. Some of the publications listed in the
catalogue for CIDOC in 1969 included "Che Guevara: Reac-
tions of the American Press Concerning the Consequences of
His Death, 1967-68," "Missionary Attitudes of the Latin-
American Episcopate Toward Indians in the Sixteenth
Century" (six volumes). Some of the seminars that had
been offered through 1969 included: "Camilla Torres: The
Development of His Ideas," "Cuban Fiction Under Castro,"
"An Analysis of the Haitian Press," and "A.New Concept of
Literacy Training." Both of these last two seminars were
taught by Illich's friend, Paulo Freire, a Brazilian who
is currently in exile because of the limited amount of
success he had in beginning to demonstrate his claim that

he could teach fifteen million illiterate Brazilians to

 

11Ibid., p. 80.

24

read in six weeks if the government would allow all
teachers to use his method.12
Because of the subject matter of some of the

publications and the publicity surrounding some of the men
and women who conducted seminars at the Center, CIDOC
became known in the late 60's as a haven for radicals,
revolutionaries, and extremists. Illich defended the
Center against this view:

we want to keep CIDOC a free island, an oasis for the free

exchange of knowledge and experience. The only rules we

hold are: one, you may talk for ten minutes without being

interrupted; two, do not try to proselytize or brainwash;

three, do not organize any direct political, economic, or

social action--not even religious movements. CIDOC is in

the deepest sense a contemplative place, not a conspira-

torial place, and this is scandalous to both the left and
the right.13

Illich's concern with the problem.of man's reaction
to social change evoked much criticism, however; many of
the hierarchy of the Church could not understand his
emphasis on sarcasm while his philosophic discussions of
the nature of violence and the necessity of reform pro-

duced first fear and then authoritarian reprisals.

 

2Friere's method is based on the principle of "conscientiza-
tion--the awakening of the political conscience of the deprived." The
words that Freire introduced to the adult illiterate were words directly
related to the social condition of the adult, for example the word "casa"
meaning house. By showing illustrations of different kinds of houses
concurrent with the word itself, houses that might vary from the
peasant's own structure erected in conditions of stark poverty to an
opulent and magnificent villa inhabited by a wealthy Brazilian govern-
ment official. While Freire has never been given government cooperation
or assistance from the teachers, his principle of conscientization had
the potential of not only literacy but also revolution which seemed too
spectacular a price for the Brazilian government to pay.

13du Plessix Gray, p. 68.

25

I would like to help people smile--smile the social system
apart. Here at CIDOC, we smile violence apart. It is a
place where violent people can come and learn a respeto
para la Vida. Real revolutionaries are men who look with

a deep sense of humor-~with sarcasmr-upon their institu-
tions. Sarcasm is adult playfulness. Cynicism is its
opposite. Instead of freedom and independence, cynicism
produces not real revolution but a regressive attachment

to slogans and selfdworship. For deadly serious revolu-
tionaries--non, merci. But sarcasm is essential, to

purify us of our illusions. As Marx said, we must go
beyond our illusions to change the conditions that made
them necessary. That is two paragraphs before the mention
of religion as the opiate of the people, in his commentary
upon Hegel's philosophy of the law. When it comes to change,
I do not really like to use the words "violence" and "non-
violence." At times, idols must be shattered. A flower
grows through stone and breaks the stone. Is that violence?

Illich has continually rejected the idea that the
Center is a rest-stop for those intent on the process of
political proselytizing and who want to use the Center as
a base for their activities. The Church, according to
Illich, must be made aware of all social injustice and
must exercise her influence in condemning such injustice,
but the Church must not proclaim one set of rigid alterna-
tives for solving such inequalities over another. The
problems of man and his relationship to his society must
be solved, according to Illich, by secular and not ecclesi-
astical ideologies. Illich's sarcasm and condemnation
extends to both right and left political constituencies as
well as to the Christian Democrats and the Catholic

Conservatives.

 

1['I'bid” p. 66.

26

Illich's estrangement from the church hierarchy
took a further step in 1967 when two articles were pub-
1ished: one was "The Seamy Side of Charity" in which
Illich joyously proclaimed the failure of the Pope's pro-
gram to have twenty thousand clergymembers from North
America migrate to Latin America in order to execute mis-
sionary endeavors there. Illich claimed that the Papal
program was instituted to keep "Latin America within the

t. "15

ideologies of the Wes Furthermore, Illich attacked

the establishment of and the increased support of the
already existing upper and middle-class Church schools
which he claimed further alienated and discriminated
against the poor. Simply increasing the number of clergy
was one way to refuse to look at the central crisis which
in Illich's view was that of an irrelevant Church.

The promise of more clergy is like a bewitching siren.

It makes the chronic surplus of clergy in Latin America

invisible and it makes it impossible to diagnose this

surplus as the gravest illness of the Church. . . . If

North America and Europe send enough priests to fill the

vacant parishes, there is no need to consider laymen to

fulfill most evangelical tasks; no need to re-examine the

structure of the parish, the function of the priest; no

need for exploring the use of the married diaconage, and

new forms of celebration.16

The second article that was published in 1967 was

one which Illich had written originally in German in 1961

entitled "The Vanishing Clergyman." This article posits

 

15Ivan Illich, "The Seamy Side of Charity," America,
January 21, 1967, p. 90.

16Ibid.

27

new and in some cases a call for a return to authentic
forms of the ministry.

The Roman Church is the world's largest non-governmental

bureaucracy. Men suspect that it has lost its relevance

to the Gospel and to the world. Wavering, doubt, and

confusion reign among its directors, functionaries, and

employees. The giant begins to totter before it collapses.

Some Church personnel react to the breakdown with pain,

anguish, and fright. Some make heroic efforts and tragic

sacrifices to prevent it. . . . I would like to suggest

that we welcome the disappearance of institutional

bureaucracy in a spirit of deep joy.17

Illich predicted that a layman would preside over

the Christian community of the future, and he denounced
the Church's linkage of celibacy and the priesthood. In a
heavily sarcastic passage, Illich argued against the
relaxation of present Vatican policy to allow for the
ordination of married priests because, Illich claimed, the
Church already had an excess of unmarried ones. "During
this time, ordination of married men would be a sad mistake.

"18 Illich pro-

It would only delay needed radical reforms.
claimed that priests should adhere to the Vatican position
on celibacy because the Pope's "position helps assure the
speedy death of the clergy."19
After the publication of these articles, there were
many in the hierarchy who believed that Illich had scandal-

ized not only themselves but the entire Catholic Church as

 

17Ivan Illich, "The Vanishing Clergyman," The Critic, XXV
(June-July, 1967), 22.

181bid., p. 23.

19Ibid., p. 26.

28

' well, and these critics set out to discredit him, Bishop
Mendez Arceo also came under their objurgations, not only
for his patronage and defense of Illich but for his own
contemporary ideas concerning the celebration of various
liturgies, his belief in the necessity to deemphasize the
cult of Mary, and his support of Grégoire Lemercier and the
Benedictine monks in their use of psychotherapy. On
October 4, 1967, an open letter to Pope Paul was published
in the largest daily papers in Mexico as a paid advertise-
ment from the Committee for the Recovery of the Catholic
Church in Cuernavaca. The letter was signed by about
twenty prominent laymen and priests, and it concluded:

The spectacular and theatrical liturgy that we have seen

in the Cuernavaca cathedral, the new so-called Gospel

that its bishop preaches, the psychoanalyzed and degenerate

community fostered under him, the touristic hotel run by

Monsignor Illich, where bizarre things have been witnessed—-

these are not, cannot be, the work of God.20

A letter was then written by the Archbishop of

Puebla, who was also the president of the Conference of
Mexican Bishops, to Cardinal Spellman in New York asking
that Illich be recalled. Cardinal Spellman declined to
recall him, proclaiming his faith in Illich as a man and
as a priest. However, Cardinal Spellman died about two
weeks later, and within a few weeks after his death, new
letters were received by the New York chancery office

demanding that Illich be recalled. On December 19, Bishop

John Maguire, who was Cardinal Spellman's temporary

 

20du Plessix Gray, p. 87.

29

successor, wrote to Illich requesting that he return to New
York and stating that this order came from Rome. Illich
answered Bishop Maguire on January 6th, 1969, stating that.
he (Illich) was sorry but his duties in Cuernavaca at the
moment prevented him from making such a trip. Bishop
Maguire accepted this excuse and forwarded Illich's declara-
tion on to Rome to Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, an arch-
conservative who served on the Roman Curia.21
Illich also wrote a letter to the Pope in January,
attempting to initiate some kind of a dialogue, but his
letter was never answered. Meanwhile the vituperations
against him continued, and on June 10th, the Apostolic
Delegate to Mexico, Guido de Mestri, informed Illich that
he must fly to Rome immediately and present himself for
interrogation at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith. De Mestri had once remarked to Illich, "Your posi-
tion is so canonically impeccable that I doubt if you are
even a Christian."22
The now celebrated interrogation took place in a
subterranean chamber of the Vatican with only three men
present, Illich and two priests,vmo were eventually intro-
duced as Monsignor de Magistris and Monsignor Casoria. The

interview commenced with dramatic dialogue. The visitor

presented himself to the man in a black, violet trimmed

 

erbido’ p. 88.

22Ibid., p. 89.

30

cassock seated behind the table: "I am Illich." "I know."
"Monsignor, who are you?" "I am your judge."23

Illich was asked to swear that he would speak the
truth and that he would keep secret everything that took
place in the proceedings. Illich agreed to speak with
veracity, but he did not agree to taking an oath of
secrecy. On the contrary, he claimed that he wanted all
that took place to become a matter of public record which
he said was a right guaranteed by the papal edict "Integrae
Servandae" of 1965. After much arguing and a conference
between MOnsignor de Magistris and Cardinal Seper (Franjo
Cardinal Seper of Yugoslavia was the head of the Congrega-
tion, and he had met Illich earlier that morning), it was
agreed that Illich would not have to answer any of the
charges until he had received a written copy of them all.
Illich returned to the Capranica Hotel in Rome, and later
that afternoon a messenger brought him a xeroxed copy of
the questionnaire from the Congregation.

Some of the major concerns articulated by the
Congregation included "Weird Conceptions about the Clergy
in the Church" and "Subversive Interpretation Concerning

24

the Liturgy and Ecclesiastical Discipline." Subsumed

under these and other serious topics for consideration were

 

23
1969) , 48.

24Ibid.

"Get Going and Don't Come Back," Time, XCIII (February 14,

31

a list of eighty-five specific queries to which Illich was
expected to respond. Some of these questions are printed
here to attest and give evidence to the extent to which the
hierarchy of the Church was threatened by Illich and to
illustrate the suspicions, the fear of dangerous dogma, and
the many misconceptions which Illich's ideology engendered
within the bureaucracy of his Church.

What do you think of Heaven and Hell, and also of
Limbo?

Do you deny the distinction between shepherds and
sheep among the people of God on earth?

What are your thoughts on the peaceful coexistence
of East and West?

What did you have to do with the kidnapping of the
Archbishop of Guatemala?

What is the nature of your relations with Octavio
Paz and Carlos Fuentes?

Is it true that you would like to see women go to
confession without a grate in the confessional box?

Is it true that, beginning in 1960, there has been
in you a dangerous general development of new ideas and
disintegrating tendencies of a humanitarian and
libertine nature?

What would you answer to those who say that you are
petulant, adventurous, imprudent, fanatical, and
hypnotizing, a rebel against all authority, disposed to
accept and recognize only that of the Bishop of Cuernavaca,
Mexico?25

What is your thought on the nationalism of states, on
international Marxism and on Catholicism in religious,
political, social, and economic world order?

What do you say about the idea of modernist, revolu-
tionary, and guerrilla priests in Latin America, the ones
who say that if the Catholic is not a revolutionary and
on the side of the revolutionaries, then he is in mortal
sin?

Is it true that in the neighborhood of CIDOC, gather-
ings and parties are held, even at night, in the private
rooms of young girls either guests of employees, and
that priests and nuns are present at these?

 

25du Plessix Gray, p. 41.

32

Is it true that various publications of CIDOC
readily and avidly print articles containing communist
propaganda, as well as qualified comments on religion
in general, and Protestant and anti-Catholic thought in
particular?26

Illich responded to these accusations by writing an
eight page letter to Cardinal Seper which he delivered to
the Cardinal at the Vatican the following morning. In the
letter Illich stated that he had decided not to offer a
personal defense to the charges at all.

Following upon the interview that Your Eminence
granted me yesterday morning with so much pastoral
feeling, I find myself obliged to report to Your Eminence
all that took place during and after the interrogation
conducted by Msgr. de Magistris and Msgr. Casoria, and to
give Your Eminence my own view of the situation as it now
stands.

Let me start by saying that, faced with authoritative
procedures which, at least in my opinion, are very ques-
tionable in both substance and style, I am left-~as a
Christian and as a priest--with a single, clear-cut choice.

I can, on the one hand, simply withhold any defense of
myself, without claiming my reasonable rights or advancing
my lawful defense. On the other hand, I can (not for my
sake but for the sake of defending the divine constitution
of the Church and the honorable status of its ecclesiasti-
cal institutions) set myself systematically in opposition
to everything that I recognize as a distortion of the
Gospel, contrary to what has been decided by the councils,
and contrary even to the most recent and repeated state-
ments of the highest ecclesiastical authorities.

Eminence, I must acknowledge to you that I have
decisively chosen the first way, and that I have resolved
to take as my watchword "If a man asks you to lend him
your coat, then give him your shirt as well."27

Cardinal Seper received Illich, read the letter,

and affectionately sent Illich on his way with the words

 

26Peter Schrag, "Ivan Illich: The Christian as Rebel,"
Saturday Review, LIII (July 19, 1969), 15-16.

27du Plessix Gray, p. 42.

33

"Get going, get going, and never come back!" Illich has
recalled since then that these words were very similar to
the last words spoken by the Grand Inquisitor to his

prisoner, Jesus Christ, in Dostoevski's The Brothers

 

Karamazov. In the story by Dostoevski, the Grand Inquisi-

 

tor pronounces sentence on Christ because his ideas of
freedom are too dangerous. Christ kisses him, and the
Inquisitor orders him out with the words, "Go, and come no
more-~come not at all, never, never!"

Illich left Rome and returned to Cuernavaca where
he remained taciturn on the activities of the Congrega-
tion's inquisition. However, in January of 1969, the
Vatican responded to the increased clamor of criticism
concerning Illich and the Center. The Vatican issued a
statement forbidding all Catholic priests, monks, and nuns
to attend any more of the courses and seminars at CIDOC.
Illich retaliated by calling Edward B. Fiske, who was the
religion editor for The New York Times and inviting him to
Cuernavaca for an interview. Fiske accepted Illich's
invitation and then printed the entire story in the Timg§.28

After Fiske's initial article appeared in the

Times, Monsignore de Magistris was questioned about the

validity of Illich's statements, but he refused to either

 

28Edward B. Fiske, "Vatican Court Aimed at Cultural Center of
Reform Advocate," The New Ybrk Times, January 23, 1969, pp. l-2; and
"Head of Cultural Center Tells of Secret Hearing in Vatican," The New
York Times, February 4, 1969, p. 2.

34

confirm or deny even the appearance of Illich before the

Congregation. "For the press," de Magistris stated, "we

simply do not exist."29

Prior to Illich's appearance in Rome, he had
quietly asked for and received temporary lay status from
Archbishop Terence Cooke of New York. This status deprived
the Vatican of the opportunity to suspend him, but by
requesting it, Illich relinquished the right to celebrate
Mass publicly and to perform certain other priestly func-
tions. After the ban on his educational center was issued,
Illich decided to stay at Cuernavaca in a lay status while
observing the celibacy of a priest. "I am giving up

proving my orthodoxy to the Vatican. I have, now, no

"30

further desire to do so. In a letter to Mendez Arceo,

Illich expressed his disappointment and anger over the
Vatican's pronouncement.

I am deeply saddened by this procedure of the Holy See,
which is the supreme teaching authority of the Church.

I am distressed as I watch the Roman Curia launch a
grave and global accusation against a nonsectarian
institution of higher learning, without even mentioning
a single charge. . . . I am indeed sad, yet hopeful.

The roots of my mind and of my heart have taken in the
soil of the Roman Church. I am embarrassed by this decree,
but my embarrassment will fade as it has before in front
of Her immense contribution to beauty, truth, and aware—
ness. . . . We shall leave it to others to express their
indignation at the precedent-setting intervention of

 

29Fiske, "Head of Cultural Center Tells of Secret Hearing in

Vatican."

3ol’bid.

35

Rome in academic life through the ecclesiastical ban
of an entire academic community.31

In March, 1969, Illich decided to withdraw per-
manently from Church service. In a letter to the then

Archbishop Terence Cooke, Illich explained:

By now the press has extensively covered the proceedings
of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the
former Holy Office) which were aimed at my work and my
reputation. These proceedings have cast over me the
shadow of a "notorious churchman," and this interferes
with my ministry, my work as an educator, and my per-
sonal decision to live as a Christian. . . . I now want
to inform you of my irrevocable decision to resign
entirely from Church service, to suspend the exercise

of priestly functions, and to renounce totally all titles,
offices, benefits, and privileges which are due to me as
a cleric.32

Illich also asked for permission to say his breviary daily

and to remain celibate. Although Cardinal Cooke has
refused to comment on Illich's status, other Church
authorities have stated that while he does not function
as a cleric any longer, he still remains a priest. The
irony of this statement is unique since the subtle dis-
tinction between cleric and priest is critical to the
current dialogue among the clergy themselves concerning
the functions of their vocations.

In June, 1969, Pope Paul issued a reversal of the

ban on the attendance of priests and nuns at CIDOC; however,

there were to be some lhmitations on the Center's activity.

 

31Fiske, "Vatican Court Aimed at Cultural Center of Reform
Advocate," p. 2.

32du Plessix Gray, p. 191.

36

In an audience with Mendez Arceo, Pope Paul outlined the
specifications. CIDOC was to return to "the spirit of its
foundation" and its teachings were to be supervised by
the Conference of Latin-American Bishops. Furthermore,
Illich was to resign from.the Center. Illich stated
after the relaxation of the ban that it would have no more
effect on the Center than the original invocation of the
ruling had had. The Center, Illich maintained, had always
been, and would continue to be, a secular organization.
Illich has since resigned as the Director of the
Center; this position is currently held by Valentina
Borremans, who originally began her association with the
Center as the librarian and who has been very active in
the expansion of the library which knows few equals in the
area of social and political change in contemporary Latin
America. While Illich is no longer the administrative
director of CIDOC, he is still very much involved in its
activities. At the time of this study, Illich was living
in a house a few miles from CIDOC where he spends his time
studying when he is not lecturing or facilitating discus-
sions at the Center. He travels out of Cuernavaca fre-
quently to speak to others interested in what could emerge
as the most crucial question of human history--the relation-
ship between man's manner of existence and the social
organizations which either sustain or constrict him.

Illich expresses it thusly:

37

I am not a prophet, and I do not want to become a
futurologist. I think that what we should be concerned
with here at CIDOC is to be humorists. That is people
who are continuously aware that through the development
of imagination and by looking at flowers you can kind

of imagine an analog to every social system that is 33
just slightly off-key and, therefore, makes you smile.

Illich's analysis of social institutions reflects
two major concerns, both of them rooted in his own activity
and his relationship to the Church. First, he is inter-
ested in exploring the character and formation of experi-
ence in the myths that shape culture--an historical pre-
occupation of religion. Second, he speaks to the signifi-
cance for individual behavior of institutional organization,
a significance that was at the center of his dispute with
the Church. The next chapter treats these two dimensions
of Illich's work, along with a summary overview of his

reform proposals.

 

33Cowan, p. 217.

CHAPTER III

CONTEMPORARY MYTHOLOGY: ITS SIGNIFICANCE
AND SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR ITS EXTIRPATION

Now I a fourfold vision see,

And a fourfold vision is given to me;
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah's night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton's sleep!

- William Blake

My grandmother wanted me to have an
education, so she kept me out of school.

- Margaret Mead

William Blake claimed that the prevailing percep-
tion of reality during his lifetime was essentially an
illusion, a distorted image produced through the idolatry
of science. This illusion Blake called single vision, and
Blake believed it was this commitment to single vision
that led man to accept the premise that science can
quantify all that man can ever know. Blake believed this
not only to be a very impoverished theory of the nature
of man but also a theory that would eventually lead from
crisis to destruction. What Blake so articulately argued
for was the apprehension of the world from the perspective

of a multiple vision, a vision that encompassed not only

38

39

Newtonian science but also the imagination, the creative
force, of man himself. The emphasis of a multiple vision
is on the individual and not the technology.

Ivan Illich argues also for a multiple vision, a
conception of reality that does not demand technological
answers to what are fundamentally ethical questions.
Illich is certainly not anti-rational, but he is concerned
with the current cult of product-worshippers. In his
study of the problem.of man and his relationship to his
social institutions, Illich has examined many claims of
our culture. One of these is the theory that the progress
of technology is unending and concomitant with and
dependent upon this progress is the spiritual and material
well-being of all the world's peoples. This, Illich
believes, is the central illusion of our time.

The illusion that growth and technological
sophistication will automatically benefit all people is
just that, an illusion. It is a myth, Illich states, that
is not only created but perpetuated by technology itself.

The myth of unending consumption is . grounded in the
belief that process inevitably produces something of value
and, therefore, production necessarily produces demand."1
This myth continues to exist primarily because of the
exposure it gets through the school systems of the world,

especially the school systems in the United States.

 

1Illich, Deschooling Society, p. 38.

40

School is defined by Illich as ". . . the age-specific,
teacher-related process requiring full-time attendance at
an obligatory curriculum."2

Illich quotes Marx as saying that man must go
beyond his illusions in order to change the conditions

3 We must be capable

which make these illusions necessary.
of extension beyond a class society in order to alter the
conditions which make such a society necessary. Concomi-
tant with the myth of unending consumption, Illich
explores several other distortions dominant in current
culture: the confusion of process and substance, teaching
and learning, grade advancement and education, a diploma
and competence, fluency and the ability to say something
new, service and value, and education and Schooling.4
Paul Goodman said that science and technology

eventually become the system of mass faith. Herbert
Marcuse posits the same theory when he states,

. . . technical progress, extended to a whole system of

domination and coordination, creates forms of life (and

of power) which appear to reconcile the forces opposing

the system and to defeat or refute all protest in the

name of the historical prospects of freedom from toil
and domination.5

 

2Ibid., p. 26

3Ivan Illich, "Ivan Illich Challenges Education." A tape,
Argus Communications, 3505 N. Ashland, Chicago, Illinois.

"Ibid.

5Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1968), p. 70.

41

Illich reiterates this view when he claims that "social
reality itself has become schooled."6

Our basic human needs are now translated by our
society into demands for more and more scientifically pro-
duced commodities. The technological extensions that
McLuhan mentioned have indeed become the initiators. Even
poverty is currently definable by set standards which the
technician can change at will. Theodore Rosak expresses
if thusly:

We must come to see that enforced, wholesale, and rapid
urbanization has been an irrational obsession of the
industrial ethos. . . . We have defined the city as
progress, rural and village ways as backward, and we have
shaped our economy to suit this distorted conception of
historical necessity.

These industry-technology-based definitions and
classifications are seen by Illich as being primarily
transmitted via contemporary schools. The schools are
described as culture transmitting ritualistic institutions
which Illich analyzes in comparison to previous religious
cultures. Religion may once have formulated a world view,
according to Illich, but he sees religion now as either
irrelevant or to a great extent as independent from the
churches. Education must also gain such independence from

the schools. Similar to the traditional church before the

Reformation, certain policies of the school may be

 

6Illich, "Illich Challenges Education."

7Theodore Rosak, Where the wasteland Ends (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday and Co., 1972), p. 419.

42

questioned by the people but not by the institution itself.
During the 18th century, men wondered if it were necessary
for all men to be clerics in order to be qualified to
govern their constituents; by the 19th century the answer

of the populus was negative. Illich believes that religious
freedom was granted in return for obligatory schooling.
Religion became optional when schooling became obligatory.
As the unchurched ceased to be regarded as the rebels of
society, discrimination increased against the unschooled

in the United States, particularly.

Three functions of today's schools which Illich
views as once being common to the powerful churches include
being ". . . simultaneously the repository of society's
myth, the institutionalization of that myth's contradic-
tions, and the locus of the ritual which reproduces and

8 Both

veils the disparities between myth and reality."
church and school provide a ritual in which each citizen
participates and in which each can see himself belonging
and witnessing to others where he belongs. Just as the
church was to save you from hell, the school is to save
you from the ghetto, and both are substitute mothers.

Equal educational opportunity is, indeed, both a

desirable and a feasible goal, but to equate this with

obligatory schooling is to confuse salvation with the

Church. School has become the world religion of a

modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of
salvation to the poor of the technological age.9

 

8Illich, Deschooling Society, p. 37.

9Ivan Illich, "Why We Must Abolish Schooling," New York
Review of Books, XV (July 2, 1970), 12.

43

One of the central and most dangerous distortions
engendered and communicated by the school is a perspective
of the world in which everything, including man himself,
can be quantified. Within this view even personal growth
becomes a measurable entity. It is this particular
property of the school, the disparity between myth and
reality, that Illich sees as one of the most difficult yet
necessary challenges. "Neither ideological criticism nor
social action can bring about a new society. Only dis-
enchantment with and detachment from.the central social,
ritual and reform of that ritual can bring about radical
change."10

Illich agrees with Philippe Aries in his belief
that childhood is the invention of the industrial age who

needed to rationalize the necessity of schooling for the

young.11 In greatly oversimplified terms, schooling thus

 

10Illich, Deschooling Society, p. 37.

11"Starting in the fifteenth century, the reality and the
idea of the family were to change; a slow and profound revolution,
scarcely distinguished by either contemporary observers or later
historians, and difficult to recognize. And yet the essential event
is quite obvious: the extension of school education. we have seen
how in the Middle Ages children's education was ensured by apprentice-
ship to adults, and that after the age of seven, children lived in
families other than their own. Henceforth, on the contrary, education
became increasingly a matter for the school. The school ceased to be
confined to clerics and became the normal instrument of social initia-
tion, of progress from childhood to manhood. This evolution corre-
sponded to the pedagogues' desire for moral Severity, to a concern
to isolate youth from the corrupt world of adults, a determination
to train it to resist adult temptations. But it also corresponded
to a desire on the part of the parents to watch more closely over
their children, to stay nearer to them, to avoid abandoning them even
temporarily to the care of another family. . . . The survival of the

44

became equated with education and took the place of an
apprenticeship. Schools became a process whereby a person
could achieve full recognition into society only after a
lengthy period of required treatment. The commodity which
schools produced that enabled a person to be initiated
into society was education. Without a long period of
schooling, there could be no education, and therefore, no
full admittance into society. It is this myth that Illich
attacks.

Since Illich does claim to be addressing himself
to the problems existent in the structure of society,
rather than simply the substance of it, his strategy for
reform involves the disestablishment of the organization
known as "school" rather than a change in its content or
curriculum. "I believe that the disestablishment of
schools has become inevitable and that this end of an
illusion should fill use with hope."12 This imperative is
based on man's need at this particular moment in history
to develop an entirely new perspective about himself and

the world around him, a multiple vision. This perspective

 

apprenticeship system at the two extremities of the social ladder did
not prevent its decline; it was the school which triumphed by means
of its increased authority. Our modern civilization, built on a
scholastic foundation, was now solidly established, and time would
steadily consolidate it by prolonging and extending school life."
From Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Sbcial History of
Family Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), pp. 226-227.

12Ivan Illich, "The Alternative to Schooling," Saturday
Review, LIV (June 19, 1971), 44.

45

would enable man to see manipulative technologies for what \.
they actually are--reshapers of human life and human values
in order to serve the purposes of these same technologies.
While Illich does cite the school as a paradigm case of a
complex, inhuman, and manipulative institution, he is in
actuality calling for the restructuring of our entire
social order.

If a person is to develop and grow intellectually

and emotionally, he needs . access to things, to
places and to processes, to events and to records. He
needs to see, to touch, and to tinker with, to grasp
whatever there is in a meaningful setting. This access

is now largely denied."13

The restrictions present in
schools today, such as what a child may study and when he
may study it, Illich views as schooling f2; life rather
than as opportunities for an education in_everyday life.
"Access to reality constitutes a fundamental alternative
in education to a system that only purports to teach about
it. "14

The functions of contemporary schools are ranked
by Illich in order of their importance to today's society:
first, custodial care; second, the selection and certifi-

cation for social roles and status within the community;

thirdly, indoctrination to social values; and lastly,

 

13Ibid. , p. 48.

1".‘l'bid .

46

learning.15 These functions are consequences of the
structure of the school, itself, and this structure is
represented by what Illich refers to as "the hidden
curriculum," that is a framework which cannot be altered
and within which all changes in the curriculum.are

accomplished. This structure . conveys indelibly the
message that only through schooling can an individual pre-
pare himself for adulthood in society, and what is not
taught in school is of little value, and that what is

16 It is

learned outside of school is not worth knowing."
this hidden curriculum which changes learning from an
activity into a commodity, from a verb into a noun, into
a situation in which.man becomes the consumer of the
product, learning.

The process of schooling according to Illich
compels children to attend on the supposition that
children can also be compelled to learn; it segregates
children away from real life conditions; schooling is
based on the supposition that learning consists in being
taught by a teacher; and it identifies education with the
number of years of schooling or the degrees obtained.
Schooling further inculcates in the child the insidious

condition of "rising expectations" which in turn creates

in him the needs that enable the inhuman and manipulative

 

15Illich, "Illich Challenges Education."

16Illich, "The Alternative to Schooling," p. 48.

47

technologies to continue to expand. Finally, schooling
prepares the child to compete for bigger and better
products and thusly condemns him to ever greater consump-
tion. The cycle is complete, and the technology which man
created now controls him. Instead of fulfilling an
authentic need, the manipulative technologies distort and
control man's life while creating in him the desire for
more consumption and greater technologies.

How then can schools be disestablished, or to use
Illich's own terminology, how can the deschooling of
society be accomplished? Can the schools be improved?

Can more education he offered outside of the school? What
are the conditions of the educational system that do not
hinge on the school? Can contemporary man provide an
education for his children without recourse to the school
or its equivalent? These are the questions to which Illich
has addressed himself in an effort to posit some alterna-
tives to a schooled society.

The answer to the question of whether schdols can
be improved is an emphatic no,.and it is this claim that
separates Illich from the majority of modern educational
critics, many of whom share his belief in the dehumaniza-
tion of modern institutionszfijErich Fromm, for example,
views human nature as capable of only a limited number of
potential structures which give rise to three possible

alternative solutions to the crisis of current alienated

48

technology. Fromm defines these alternatives as: first,
we can continue in the direction we are going, which will
lead to pathology or thermonuclear war; second, we can
change our society through force and revolution, which
will lead to the breakdown of the total system.from.which
violence and a brutal dictatorship would evolve; third, we
can strive for the humanization of the system we now have,
gaining control of the economic and social organizations
and processes, so that man can live an autonomous life.17
While Illich is sympathetic to the goal of an autonomous
life, his claim is that the current system must be dis-
established before a humanized society can evolve.

In answer to the question of whether more education
could be offered outside of the school, Illich would say
yes, since he contends that almost all education does
take place spontaneously outside the confines of the
classroom anyway. To answer the last two questions,

Illich has posited some specific alternatives to formal
and obligatory schooling.
The alternative to dependence on schools is not the use
of public resources for some new device which "makes"
people learn; rather it is the creation of a new style
of educational relationship between man and his environ-
ment. To foster this style, attitudes toward growing up,

the tools available for learning, and the quality and
structure of daily life will have to change concurrently.

 

17Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope (New York: Harper and

Row, 1968), p. 63.

18Ivan Illich, "Education Without Schools: How It Can Be
Done," New YOrk Review of Books, XV (January 7, 1971), 25.

49

Still using the school as a paradigm of a restric-
tive social institution, Illich proposes several procedures.
In order to abolish the schools constitutionally, laws are
necessary which will forbid discrimination in hiring,
voting, or admission to learning centers based on previous
attendance at some specified curriculum. This would not,
however, exclude whatever performance tests might be
necessary to determine competency. In some cases accept-
ance into a program might presuppose competence in another
skill; competency must, however, be permanently separated
from curriculum.

In addition to constitutional protection from
schools, Illich has offered a plan for educational credit
which might be provided to each person at birth and would
then enable the person to acquire whatever skills or
knowledge he wished at his own convenience. A third
innovation which Illich advocates is the establishment of
skill centers where a person could learn a desired skill
and be judged solely on the results and not on the per-
sonnel or the process whereby this skill was acquired.

Today's schools are incompetent in skill instruc-
tion according to Illich because one skill is chained to
another much as the proposals that go to Congress often
have appended to them an unwanted rider; if you accept

one, you must accept the other. The skills taught in

50

schools are often connected to another unrelated and
irrelevant task.

Finally, Illich proposes a learning network to
take the place of schools. This network would give each
person a chance to share his concerns with others who were
interested in similar ideas. In an attempt to provide
learners with the necessary access to reality, Illich has
posited a skill exchange which would bring together those
with technical excellence in some area and those who
wanted to learn this proficiency. Educational objects
would be made available to those who wanted to study them,
peers could be matched so that they could learn from one
another in a spontaneous and organic environment. Those
teachers or educational guides who were especially gifted
would be more readily accessible to others who wanted to
study with them.

Perhaps the most important condition which Illich
describes as being necessary to a viable alternative is
that compulsory attendance at school be discontinued
immediately. Then, new formal procedures such as outlined
here for the acquisition of skills could be allowed to
develop along with a new approach to informal and spon-
taneous education. Man would be able to identify for
himself his real and authentic needs, not those programmed
into him through his schooling. "Only when a man recovers

this sense of personal responsibility for what he learns

51

and teaches can this spell be broken and the alienation
of learning from living be overcome."19
Once the authentic desires of man are identified,

a new structure for society could be created. This
structure, according to Illich, would inculcate the con-
cept of humanity, what it means to be a human, and as a
human what it means to function in a responsible way.

The celebration of man's humanity through joining

together in the healing expression of one's relation-

ships with others, and one's growing acceptance of

one's own nature and needs, will clearly create major

confrontations with existing values and systems. The

expanding dignity of each man and each human relation-

ship must necessarily challenge existing systems.20

The structure of this new society would take the

form of "convivial" technologies--technologies which serve
man and help him fulfill himself personally while aiding
him in valid relationships with other people. Convivial
as defined by Illich is a ". . . technical term to desig-
nate a modern society of reasonably limited tools."21
This definition exemplifies Illich's vigorous and abiding
interest in language. The words one uses to communicate
an idea are of central importance to Illich, and his own
choice of words is both fastidious and creative.

("Deschooling," for example, has become an educational

slogan of our time.) Illich's selection of the terms

 

19Illich, "The Alternative to Schooling," p. 48.

20Ivan Illich, Celebration of'Awareness: A call for Institu-
tional Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1970), p. 19.

21Ivan Illich, Tbols for Cbnviviality (New York: Harper and
Row, 1973), p. xxiv.

52

"convivial" and "tool" was by no means a random or casual
one. Both words are heavily overlaid with connotations
which have no meaning whatever in Illich's linguistic
vocabulary. His creative expressions demand adherence to
his own interpretations if one is to understand his explana-
tions, yet with his high degree of selectivity of word
choice, he is able to endow our language with new, powerful,
and original meanings.

In English the word "tool" now denotes nothing more
than a utensil, an object one might use to accomplish a
specific task. Just as he has defined the parameters of
meaning for "convivial," Illich has reclaimed a symbolic
status for the word "tool"—-an organization, a procedure,
all of which are capable of translating the deepest per-
ceptions of the culture in which they are employed.

The concept of a "limited tool" is significant to
Illich's thesis of man's relationship to his environment.
Limited here is used to denote the opposite of "unlimited"
or "undefined" rather than "repressive" or "constrained."
The difference is slight and highly abstract but a
necessary one to discern if one is to fully comprehend
Illich's illucidations. His theory is that a convivial
society is possible only if certain limits are applied to
industrial growth, limits that can be applied to both goods

and services produced in an industrial state. Implicit in

53

Illich's theory of limitation is a concomitant belief in
a more equitable distribution of available resources.

Illich has cited the mass production of education
through the schools as an example of an industrial enter-
prise, producing a service commodity, yet organized as a
public utility, and defines its output as a basic necessity.
Besides schools, Illich sees professional health care and
systems of public transport as examples of such industrial
enterprises. All of these organizations create alienation,
exploitation, and despair because they have exceeded the
limits of their effectiveness.

In the example of health services, as the value of
the services rises, it becomes impossible for people to
care any longer. As the per capita cost of preventive
health care rises, paradoxically, the per capita cost of
treatment rises also. The crisis of contemporary medicine
arises Illich states:

. . . from the development of a professional complex
supported and exhorted by society to provide increasingly
"better" health, and from the willingness of clients to
serve as guinea pigs in this vain experiment. People
have lost the right to declare themselves sick; society
now accepts their claims to sickness only after certifi-
cation by medical bureaucrats.

Transportation as well as education have both

followed this pattern of evolution, according to Illich.

In the beginning,

 

zzlbid. , p. 6.

54

. . . new knowledge is applied to the solution of a clearly
stated problem and scientific measuring sticks are applied
to account for the new efficiency. But at a second point,
the progress demonstrated in a previous achievement is used
as a rationale for the exploitation of society as a whole
in the service of a value which is determined and constantly
revised by an element of society by one of its self-
certifying professional elites. 5
Contemporary society is viewed by Illich as heading
for catastrophe and destruction because of the inability of
any kind of industrial production to satisfy the ravenous
needs which it creates among members of our society. This
criticism is not substantially different from.that of
Marcuse who states that in order to survive,man must
struggle
. . . against the system's ubiquitous pressure, which by
means of its repressive and destructive productivity
degrades everything, in an increasingly inhuman way, to
the status of a commodity whose purchase and Sale provide
the sustenance and content of life; against the system's
hypocritical morality and "values"; and against the
terror employed outside the metropolis.24
Illich's conclusions, however, that a convivial
society can be attained through limitation which gives
rise to freedom is remarkably different from.Marcuse and
other structuralists. In order to solve the contemporary
crisis situation, Illich believes we must learn to invert
the present organizational procedure for the utilization
of our tools. Instead of an increasing demand for new and

more efficient products, a demand which defines the

 

23Ibid., p. 7.

2"Marcuse, Five Lectures, p. 86.

55

progress of society itself, modern technology must be
limited to permit the emergence of a new life style, one
committed to personal rather than institutionalized values.
The ethical virtue to which Illich attaches the most sig-
nificance, the one that is intrinsic to an authentically
convivial society, is that of individual autonomy. A
convivial society is one in which there is a continuous
and creatively autonomous interaction among its members
and between members and their environment. This individual
interaction among people could then expand and allow for
an enlarged contribution ". . . of autonomous individuals
and primary groups to the total effectiveness of a new
system of production designed to satisfy the human needs
which it also determines."25
The structure of the tools with which man may work
is crucial to Illich's theory of limitation and convivial-A
ity. The less the tools are convivial, the more teaching
and instruction they require for their use. In other
words, the less accessible they are to all people, the
more manipulation and discrimination is involved in their
employment. As centralization and specialization increase,
the personal control over one's own lifestyle—-the type of
knowledge one seeks, the work one chooses to perform, etc.--

decreases. "More of what each man must know is due to

 

25Illich, Tools for conviviality, p. 10.

56

what another man has designed and has the power to force
on him."26 As learning becomes more and more a commodity,
man's creative power to endow the world with his personal
signature becomes diseased, then dissipated, and it is
finally extinguished. People, according to Illich, cannot
be taught to live within limits. Their survival, indeed,
is dependent upon their learning what they can Egg do.

Illich does not believe that a convivial society
is a utopia beyond acquisition. In order for it to
develop, though, the use of scientific technology must be
reexamined. Science, for Illich, can lead to specializa-
tion, centralization, and the institutionalization of
values as Blake admonished, or it can increase the amount
of individual competence, control, and initiative, thereby
guaranteeing a satisfying and imaginative relationship
between persons, tools, and a new collectivity, truly
exemplifying the perspective of a multiple vision of
reality.

Such a genesis could be made possible through
additional research in the devising of tools and tool
systems which optimize the competence of the individual.
"What we need is rational research on the dimensions
within which technology can be used by concrete communities

to implement their aspirations without frustrating

 

26Ibid., p. 58.

57

equivalent aspirations by others."27 This research Illich
terms "counterfoil" and as such it is primarily concerned
with ". . . an analysis of increasing marginal disutility
and the menace of growth. It is then concerned with the
discovery of general systems of institutional structure
which optimize convivial production."28
The construction of a convivial society with con-
vivial tools for its use demands recovery through a
political process, one that employs legal and political
procedures which are accessible to all who want to partici-
pate in them. People must learn to decide for themselves
the amounts of resources which each can claim, the kind of
health care each desires, the method and speed of trans-
portation each will make use of, as well as the types of
people one wants for friends and the location of one's
residence. The erosion of personal responsibility must be
halted and control over the activities of a lifetime must
be reclaimed by each individual. Such a society can only
be obtained, in Illich's view, through the restructuring
of politics and law, through which individuals, always
recognizing the validity of conflicting interests, can

make use of language and disciplined procedure to establish

 

27I'bid., p. 78.

281bid., p. 82.

58

the necessary limitations--limitations on which human
survival may ultimately depend.

With the introduction of the concept of a convivial
society, Illich does two important things. First, he
places his vision of the "nature of man" within the modern
tradition that emphasizes the self-regulatory and socio-
biological foundations of social relationship--a tradition
that includes, if broadly construed, Marx, Dewey, Kropotkin,
and Goodman. Illich's ethical principles seem to be rooted
in a belief in the underlying rationality of man's nature,
hence man can learn to become self-limiting in his
relationship with other men and with his environment. He
will not accept self—restriction, however, until evidence
can be presented that a total breakdown of society is the
only alternative. The concept of limitation is crucial to
Illich's analysis; the ultimate conditions of a convivial
society are dependent upon it, and he believes that once
man is made aware of the current desperate state of
society, he will choose to become self-regulatory in his
actions. In other words, once man understands the alterna-
tives as Illich tries to present them, he will choose to
become autonomous and responsible, and the location of
authority will shift from institution to individual.

Secondly, Illich implies a distinction of kind, a
qualitative distinction, between at least two types of

social organization. That distinction, and its application

59

to an understanding of Illich's thought, will constitute

the substance of the next chapter.

CHAPTER IV

COMMUNITY AND INSTITUTION: THEIR
DISTINCTIONS AND RAMIFICATIONS
FOR CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY

Mr.0wen said he wanted honesty of purpose and he got dishonesty.
He wanted temperance, and instead, he was continually troubled
with the intemperate. He wanted industry, and he found idle-
ness. He wanted cleanliness, and found dirt. He wanted care-
fulness, and found waste. He wanted to find desire for
knowledge, but he found apathy. He wanted the principles of
the formation of character understood, and he found them
misunderstood. He wanted these good qualities combined in

one and all the individuals of the Community but he could not
find them; neither could he find those who were self-sacrificing
and enduring enough, to prepare and educate their children to
possess these qualities. Thus it was proved that his
principles were either entirely erroneous, or much in advance
of the age in which he promulgated them. He seems to have
forgotten, that if one and all the thousand persons assembled
there, had possessed the qualities which he wished them to
possess, there would have been no necessity for his vain
exertions to form a Community; because there would of
necessity be brotherly love, charity, industry and plenty.

We want no more than these; and if this is the material to
form Communities of, and we can not find it, we can not form
Communities . . . .

- John Humphrey NOyes

We are already beginning to glimpse it. It must be based
on a law of exchange, a theory of MUTUALITY, a system of
guarantees that resolves the old forms of our civil and
commercially based societies and satisfies all the conditions
of efficiency, progress and justice pointed out by the
critics. It will be a society that is not based on conven-
tion, but on reality; a society that converts the division
of labor into a scientific instrument; a society that stops
men from being the slaves of machines and foresees the crises

6()

61

that these will cause. It will make competition profitable
and transform monopoly into a guarantee of security for all.

- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

As an alternative to technocratic disaster, I propose
the vision of a convivial society. A convivial society
would be the result of social arrangements that guarantee
for each member the most ample and free access to the tools
of the community and limit this freedom only in favor of
another member's equal freedom.

- Ivan Illich

These three visions of a better world locate the

premise for their improvement within the parameters of a
specific kind of society. A. J. Macdonald's memoirs con-
cerning Robert Owen's experiments in New Harmony, Indiana,
beginning in 1826, indict humanity for a lack of brotherly
love, charity, industry, and plenty. The level of associa-
tion which Owen succeeded only briefly in obtaining,
faltered and finally succumbed, if we are to believe Mac-
donald's testimony, because people were unwilling or unable
to exercise the before mentioned qualities. The specific
type of society or association which Owen sought to advance,
was that of a community, granted that this term was to be
applied to cover a specific list of qualified behaviors
and activities.

The word "community" creates varying mental impres-
sions for all of us. It is a term that has come to be an
umbrella under which rigorously exacting definitions can

cohabitate with warm fuzzy feelings and impressions. Each

62

who uses it must seek to distinguish and identify the
singular and significant characteristics of its applica-
tion. In the interests of clarity, however, and for the
purposes of this paper, unless otherwise signified, the
term."community" will apply to a social group having certain
activities in common. It is the designation of these
activities that determines whether a community is descrip-
tive or normative. A descriptive community is one in which
people belong together because of historical, social, or
perhaps geographical conditions. These conditions could,

in fact,be determined accidentally and would not neces-
sarily include a conscious wish for mutual association.
A.normative community, however, involves a knowledgeable
determination to belong; a conscious commitment is made.
The foundation for such a commitment is the desire to

share in a common belief system. A normative or moral
community, thus, may include the characteristics of a
descriptive community as well, but a descriptive community
would not necessarily include a normative community.

The concept of "community" was examined by Proudhon
in terms of a Mutuality which would become the prevalent
pattern of all future social relationships. This mutualism
could be engendered according to Proudhon through just,
meaning fair, economic and political relationships. Such
relationships could exist only without the State, without-

capitalism, and without the arbitrary alienation that

63

separates a man's work from his life. Furthermore,
Proudhon has added the dimension of technology to his
society, or more specifically he has added the dimension
of technology as it is related to the economics of a social
group. This is a most important addition and one that was
of little or no consequence to Robert Owen and New Harmony
but is of central concern to Ivan Illich.

Illich has proposed the vision of a convivial
society as an alternative to "technocratic disaster," and
he has stated that this society will be composed of "social
arrangements" guaranteeing access to "tools" and freedom
for each individual member. The success of such a society
cannot be established from.current empirical evidence.
Therefore, a theoretical analysis must beemployed and a
judgment rendered on the logical merits of such a presenta-
tion. The purpose of the remainder of this paper, then,
will be to investigate and to examine the specific
character of a convivial society and to try to determine
whether such a society is an authentic alternative to the

"technocratic disaster, which I assume to be a non-
convivial society. In order to accomplish this, it is
necessary to place Illich in a particular context of social
inquiry. This context includes those persons who have
considered themselves as revolutionaries rather than

reformers, as structuralists rather than content-changers,

and who view life from a qualitative rather than a

64

quantitative perspective. It is within this tradition

that Illich claims for himself a position, and it is the
validity of this claim that must be tested. In other words,
the status of Illich's contention to be a structuralist
depends on the kinds of differences that exist between a
convivial and nonconvivial society. Are the fundamental
differences economic, technological, cultural, ideological--
or perhaps some combination of these? One way in which
those differences might be elucidated is through an analysis
of two types of social arrangements--the community and the
institution.

In 1887 in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Ferdinand

 

T6nnies accounted for the transition from.feudal to
capitalist society with these contrasting descriptions:
. . . confident, intimate personal relations versus
relations between strangers; moral, collective, cooperative,
joint bonds versus independent, depersonalized bonds;
reciprocities, barter, and exchange versus purchase and
contract; and divine sanction versus secular sanctions.1
T6nnies description of feudal society can be applied to
the type of community Owen was intent on establishing in
New Harmony, and the antithetical description could
delineate some characteristics of our contemporary tech-
nologically dominated and manipulative social structures.

When Proudhon discusses a new society where men will not

be slaves of machines, he is stating the anarchist

 

1Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell Company), p. 192.

65

position that there is a form of social organization
which is different from that embodied by the state.
Whether we can subscribe to the philosophy of anarchism or
not, this contribution has gained widespread acceptance.
Indeed, our entire pattern of social relationships has
become governed by institutional criteria. Social life
itself has become definable in institutional terms.
Goodman expands on the increasingly prevalent organization
of social life through institutional control, using adult
leisure as an example.

What are the present goals of the philosophers of leisure,
for instance, the National Recreation Association: and
now imagine those goals achieved. There would be a hundred
million adults who have cultured hobbies to occupy their
spare time: some expert on the flute, some with do-it-
yourself kits, some good at chess and go, some square
dancing, some camping out and enjoying nature, and all
playing various athletic games. Leaf through the entire
catalogue of the National Recreation Association, take all
the items together, apply them to one hundred million
adults--and there is the picture. . . .

Now even if all these people were indeed getting deep
personal satisfaction from these activities, this is a
dismaying picture. It doesn't add up to anything. It
isn't important. There is no ethical necessity in it, no
standard. One cannot waste a hundred million people that
way.

From the present philosophy of leisure, no new culture
can emerge. What is lacking is worthdwhile community
necessity, as the serious leisure, the oxoln of the Athenians
had communal necessity, whether in the theater, the games,
the architecture and festivals, or even the talk.2

For the purposes of this paper in order to clarify

and explicate the ideology of Illich, I am prepared to

 

2Goodman, Growing Up Absurd, pp. 234-235.

66

accept this premise of the anarchists, that there is
another form of social organization which I will define as
"community," different in kind from that of the state and
that the anarchist criticism of the state as an institution
can be expanded to include all institutions. Thus we have
a society in which the social arrangements can be identi-
fied as either institutional or communitarian. I believe
that it is precisely the differences between these two
kinds of social organizations that can determine whether a
society will be, in Illich's terminology, convivial or non-
convivial.

Since all forms of social organizations seem to
have a purpose, the difference between forms must depend
on the kinds of purposes employed and the role these play
in the structure of the organization. Essentially, the
purpose of a community is one that can be traced to the
experience of the group itself; it is a purpose that is
chosen and valued for itself by members of the community.
The purpose of an institution, however, is one that is
assigned to its members from an external source, and it
may not be valued by the members at all, or perhaps it is
seen by them as a means to an end. A catalogue of six
principal distinctions between the two social forms

follows:

67

1. Institutional forms of social organization rest
upon values that are extrinsic to the participants, while
the values of communities are part of the personality
structure of the participants (emerging from values that
are viewed by the participants as possessing intrinsic
worth).

2. The institution is dominated by behavior that is
defined in the form of a role by the institution, while
the community is characterized by the unrestricted play of
the self.

3. The institution claims an abstracted, fragmented,
and functional definition of group p1ace--for example, the
assembly line--while the community exhibits the operation
of the whole person in a social context. To change the
membership of a community by even a single person might
alter the quality of that group.

4. The institution is organized as a hierarchy with
the flow of authority from the top to the bottom, such as
exhibited by a symphony orchestra and its conductor. The
community, however, allocates authority horizontally on the
basis of competence, such as illustrated by a chamber music
group.

5. In an institution the enforcement of authority is
accomplished through the same or another institution; the
discipline is external. In a community the discipline
resides within the person, and discipline arises out of a
commitment to an activity rather than from fear of an
external agent.

6. Finally, an institution is characterized by its
large size, its homogeneous function, and its persistence
through time, while a community is frequently small, multi-
functional, and ephemeral.3
One further important distinction that needs to be
cited, particularly in reference to Illich, is that between
a qualitative and quantitative perspective of life. Blake

called for a multi- rather than a single vision, and

Illich has responded with a proposal for a society based

 

3Marvin Grandstaff, "Structural Socialization and Education,"

unpublished manuscript, Michigan State University, n.d., Chapter II.

68

not on the deification of production, technologY. and con-
trol but a society whose ethical system shares three
principal values: justice, survival, and self-defined
work. This society as proposed by Illich is both
descriptive and moral, and he defines it thusly:

Each of these three values imposes its own limits on tools.

The conditions fer survival are necessary but not sufficient

to ensure justice; people can survive in prison. The con-

ditions for the just distribution of industrial outputs are

necessary, but not sufficient to promote convivial production.

People can be equally enslaved by their tools. The conditions

fer convivial work are structural arrangements that make

possible the just distribution of unprecedented power. A

postindustrial society must and can be so constructed that

no one person's ability to express himr or herself in work

will require as a condition the enforced labor or the

enforced learning or the enforced consumption of another.
Such a society seems to evidence the necessity of a quali-
tative difference in the organization of its social arrange—
ments. In other words, Illich is suggesting that there
are dimensions of human relations that have not been well
served by the existent forms of society, and indeed that
cannot be served without some drastic changes taking place.
He argues against the quantitative perspective--that which
views one form of society as sufficient to meet the needs
of all types of relationships and activities--when he
states that ". . . I want to offer a methodology by which

to recognize means which have turned into ends. My

subject is tools and not intentions. . . . I am not

 

"Illich, Tools fOr Conviviality, p. 13.

69

proposing a Utopia, but a procedure that provides each com—
munity with the choice of its unique social arrangements."5

The creation of a convivial society is not unrelated
to the notion of a "deschooled" society if one keeps in mind
a basic assumption of Illich's and those in agreement with
him about the nature of education itself. The system of
transmitting knowledge. which a society may employ can be
understood and explained best as a consequence of a reaction
to the conditions of economics and technology which are
prevalent in that society. This is distinctly different
from the claim that certain changes in curriculum have
been accomplished because of new ideologies expressed in
contemporary educational jargon and rhetoric. Illich
maintains that schools are the way they are because of the
action and interaction of the economics, politics, and
technology of the society in which the schools exist.
These material conditions influence the social arrangements
of the society and the ethical precepts to which the
society subscribes. If a society and its culture are to
be "deschooled" so that education and learning are possible
for all, the society must first, in Illich's view, be one
in which all persons have easy access to all types of
resources.

Any dialogue about knowledge is really a dialogue about

the individual in society. An analysis of the present
crisis of school leads one, then, to talk about the social

 

5.Z'bid. , p. 5.

70

structure necessary to facilitate learning, to encourage

independence and interrelationship, and to overcome

alienation. This kind of discourse is outside the usual

range of educational concern. It leads, in fact, to the

enunciation of specific political goals. These goals can

be most sharply defined by distinguishing three general

types of "intercourse" in which a person must engage if

he would grow up.

Get at the facts, get access to the tools, and bear

the responsibility for the limits within which either can

be used.6
In other words, Illich is claiming that the significance
of a society's culture, its social arrangements, its
resulting ethical imperatives cannot be slighted. Dis-~fi'
establishing schools without an accompanying commitment
to the deschooling of culture would only result in a
search for a more efficient, more comprehensive, and
increasingly alienated delivery system through which the
product--learning--would be attractively packaged with
different paper and more colorful ribbon, and the ideology
of infinitely increasing consumption would be perpetuated.

In the book, Tools for Conviviality, Illich

delineated briefly what the characteristics of a convivial
society should be as opposed to the characteristics of an
institutionally dominated culture. Some of these attri-
butes are directly stated by Illich, some I have extrapo-
lated, but all of the following can be interpreted more

precisely through the application of the six distinctions

 

6Ivan Illich, et al., After Deschooling, What? (New York:
Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 22-23.

71

between a community and an institution already cited in
this chapter. '

The goals in a convivial society are derived by
the participants; they are not goals considered to be a
"given" by some other group or agency. Thus, the goals
agreed upon by a community are not those of "planned

meanings, they are not age specific or obligatory unless
that has been previously defined by the individuals who
are themselves participating. The goals of such a com-
munity would reflect an ethical principle to which Illich
himself gives credence: only persons have ends and only
persons can work towards these goals.

The purpose of the community would evidence a
concern for the welfare of all those within the group, not
solely an educated or moneyed elite, and this concern

would not be centered on a product-oriented, materialistic

environment.

. . . periodic innovations in goods or tools foster the
belief that anything new will be proven better. This
belief has become an integral part of the modern world
view. It is forgotten that whenever a society lives by
this delusion, each marketed unit generates more wants
than it satisfies. . . . The "better" replaces the "good"
as the fundamental normative concept.

In a society caught up in the race for the better,
limits on change are experienced as a threat. The commit-
ment to the better at any cost makes the good impossible.7

 

7Illich, Tools fer Conviviality, pp. 74-75.

72

Illich's convivial society does more than shift
the focus away from industrialized methods of production,
it brings to an end the myth of unending consumption.

. . . It must soon be shown that the prevailing fundamental

structure of our present tools menaces the survival of

mankind. It must be shown that this menace is imminent

and that the effects of compulsive efficiency do more

damage than good to most people in our generation. For

this purpose we must identify the range within which our

present institutions have become frustrating, and we must

recognize another range within which our tools become

destructive of society as a whole.8
If the self-fulfilling needs of the institution itself are
no longer inculcated into those participating in institu-
tional products, through the institutional delivery system,
a demythologizing as well as a deschooling of culture can
occur.

In a society where a high priority is given to
self-worth and individual responsibility, people would be
willing to reclaim from institutions for themselves the
ability to make their own decisions about their lives;
Illich believes that man must define himself and not let
himself be delineated by other people or institutions.
When learning becomes a commodity to be marketed, it
becomes scarce. It becomes a "programmed preparation for
life in the future in the form of packaged, serial

"9

instructions produced by schools, or it can be a "con-

stant communication about ongoing life through the output

 

8Ibid., p. 45.

9Ibid., p. 59.

73

of the media and through the instructions built into con-

sumer goods."10

In either situation man is learning what
others think he should learn; he is being defined by a
format created by someone who has previously participated
in and who is interested in preserving the dynamics of the
institution itself, regardless of whether the institution
is a school, a church, an army, etc. As Blake argued for
a multiple vision rather than a strictly scientific one,
Illich argues for a society where science does not
restrict autonomy.

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.11

One of the foremost characteristics of a convivial

society would be the existence of many possible alterna-
tives from which a man might choose his work, his housing,
his transportation, his way of relating as a man to the
social structures of his world. Only if there are
realistic and viable alternatives available can an
authentic choice be made. Obviously if all work in a

society is based on the prerequisite of six years of

schooling, a man with less schooling cannot consider a

 

'orbid.

111bid., p. 60.

74

job, regardless of how skilled or unskilled he may be, as
a realistic choice.

Illich sums up his own belief in the nature of
man's freedom thusly: "I try to avoid any abstract defi-
nitions; basically describing man as free to choose
between hope and expectation, life and idol, surprise and
plan."12

What kind of a community has Illich posited as an

alternative to technocratic disaster? A society in which

 

12This paragraph is quoted from a personal letter to the

author from Illich, dated April 17, 1973. Selected paragraphs of this
letter follow:

. . . On values, I try to make an extremely succinct statement,
in terms which permit translation both into ethical and moral
terms and into mathematical models: viability-—shape of a dis-
tribution curve defining institutional outputs--same curve
defining inputs into institutions. . . .

As to acceptance of limitation: I do not believe that most people
in the world would accept something they do not now equally
accept, if they came to understand rationally that they ought

not to expect transportation at speeds above 15 miles . . . .

I do not believe that politically "desirably low" self-
restrictions will be accepted without the evidence of total
breakdown as an alternative . . . on the other hand, I already
see in Nixon's budget message a highly realistic understanding
of the need for limits in the service sector. I much fear that
bureau-fascist limits will be imposed rather than sobriety being
chosen.

As for motivation: most people I know do have a fling from

time to time: they overeat, get drunk, get sexually exhausted.
But, strangely, most of the time they are living austerely next
to a big cheese, a bottle of rum and beautiful girls. Unless man
is sick, his appetites are self-regulatory. They might later
interpret their reasonable behaviour as being rational: on the
outset, for most, it is just in good taste.

I have gone far since my writing on "learningdwebs." I believe
more and more that transmission of language, values, feelings

will always be possible only if the size of groups is small;
expansion of group-size and vulgarity cannot be easily dissociated.

75

the goals of the individuals are concurrent with the goals
of the group. The people of the society are not bound
together by coercion but by commitment to the welfare of
the totality of their members. A sense of harmony prevails
throughout as well as a sense of worth and integrated
production. It is in the truest sense an ethical community.
where values are not quantified, and members are joined by
choice and not repression. Each has agreed to operate

from a common set of principles, and each is a member of

a valid social group.

In the terms of the original analysis between
community and institution, Illich's convivial society
merits the title of community as structurally distinct
from that of an institution because: its values and goals
are intrinsic; the behavior of the individual is not
defined as an institutional role; the total person operates
within the group context; authority is based on competence;
the emphasis is on self-discipline and responsibility; and
the size of the community must be small. Illich has
stated that this social arrangement is not a utopia; it
has a place.

Historically, Kropotkin cites the capacity of man
for mutual support and aid as the foundation of our ethical
conceptions and principles. Whether this element of man's
nature as Kropotkin saw it was evidenced in the formation.

of village communities by barbarians or in the civilized

76

groups of the 1800's, the concept of community seems to be
fundamental to man's aspirations for a better world.

Many stems had no force to resist disintegration: they
broke up and were lost for history. But the more vigorous
ones did not disintegrate. They came out of the ordeal with
a new organization--the village oommunity-ewhich kept them
together for the next fifteen centuries or more. The concep-
tion of a common territory, appropriated or protected by
common efforts, was elaborated, and it took the place of the
vanishing conceptions of common descent. The common gods
gradually lost their character of ancestors and were endowed
with a local territorial character. They became the gods
or saints of a given locality; "the land" was identified
with its inhabitants. Territorial unions grew up instead of
the consanguine unions of old, and this new organization
evidently offered many advantages under the given circum-
stances. It recognized the independence of the family and
even emphasized it, the village community disclaiming all
rights of interference in what was going on within the family
enclosure; it gave much more freedom to personal initiative;
it was not hostile in principle to union between men of
different descent, and it maintained at the same time the
necessary cohesion of action and thought, while it was
strong enough to oppose the dominative tendencies of the
minorities of wizards, priests, and professional or distin-
guished warriors. Consequently it became the primary cell of
future organization, and with many nations the village com-
munity has retained this character until now.13

The same applies to our civilized world. The natural and
social calamities pass away. Whole populations are periodi-
cally reduced to misery or starvation; the very springs of
life are crushed out of millions of men, reduced to city
pauperism; the understanding and the feelings of the millions
are vitiated by teachings worked out in the interest of the
few. All this is certainly a part of our existence. But the
nucleus of mutual-support institutions, habits, and customs
remains alive with the millions; it keeps them together; and
they prefer to cling to their customs, beliefs, and traditions
rather than to accept the teachings of a war of each against
all, which are offered to them under the title of science,
but are no science at all.14

 

13Petr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (Boston: Extending Horizons
Books, n.d.), pp. 120-121.

14Ibid., pp. 260-261.

77

Now, given a provisional construction of Illich's
anthropological and political philosophy, let us turn to a
critical assessment of the adequacy of his work. We
should, of course, bear in mind that that is best regarded
as work-in-progress. The effort here is not so much to
reach any final conclusions about Illich as it is to
illuminate strengths and weaknesses and to point out

dimensions for further development.

reasons .

CHAPTER V

ILLICH, THE SOCIAL CRITIC:
REVOLUTIONARY OR REFORMER?

In the social production which men carry on they enter into
definite relations that are indispensable and independent of
their will: these relations of production correspond to a
definite stage of development of their material powers of
production. The sum total of these relations of production
constitutes the economic structure of society-~the real
foundation, on which rise legal and political super-
structures and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production in material life
determines the general character of the social, political
and spiritual processes of life. It is not the conscious-
ness of men that determines their existence, but, on the
contrary, their social existence determines their con-
sciousness.

- Karl Marx

Dad says I can quit school when I'm sixteen, and I'm sort
of anxious to because there are a lot of things I want to

learn how to do, and as my uncle says, I'm not getting any
younger.

- Stephen M. Corey

Illich has been criticized by many people for many

Philip w. Jackson remarked that not only were

there flaws in the logic of Illich but that his writing

style was "strident, bordering on hysteria.‘

charged Illich with the presentation of and adherence to

an inadequate theory of what education really is:

78

Mr. Jackson

79

Our goal, in other words, cannot simply be to eliminate
the discomfort of schooling, though certainly there is
much that should be eliminated. Nor can it even be simply
to provide environments in which students are learning
things they want to learn--a favorite image of many of the
romantic critics. It must be to create environments--
institutions, if you like--in which students are being
educated, a different matter entirely.1

Sidney Hook's language was even more graphic when
he criticized Illich's proposal to abolish all formal
schooling as "foolish and cruel," "absurd," "silly," and
"reckless." In an article entitled "Illich's Deschooled
UtOpia," Hook pronounced Deschooling Society, ". . . a book
whose absurd extremism warrants little attention from any-
one endowed with a normal portion of common sense." Hook
continued:

Nothing would please those who are opposed to desegregation
in American education today more than the abolition of
compulsory schooling. Like so many other contemporary
reactionaries of the new left, Illich talks a great deal
about freedom but neglects the principles of intellectual
authority and organization necessary to negotiate the con-
flicts of freedoms.2

Trevor Beeson found Illich's appearance in London

disappointing and the assumptions of Deschooling Society

 

dubious:

His prophetic voice needs to be heard on both sides of
the Atlantic. The fact, however, that his London appearance
was organized by the followers of Teilhard de Chardin was a
salutary warning against the danger of the devotee and the
cult. The conversion of Illich's thinking into practical
policies--something noticeably absent from his offerings at

 

1Philip W. Jackson, "DeSchooling? No!" Today's Education,

November, 1972, p. 22.

2Sidney Hook, "Illich's De-Schooled Utopia," Encounter,
January, 1972, p. 56.

80

the moment-ecould only bring disaster to the West, though
its value as an antidote to the automatic absorption of
Western values and systems by the Third World can hardly
be overestimated.3

Jonathan Kozol supports Illich's perspectives but
laments the lack of guidance for their practical applica-
tion:

I have twice visited Cuernavaca to talk with Ivan Illich and
Edward Reimer. Twice I have returned to Boston to confront
the hard realities that still must shape decision-making here.
It is a luxury, at 2,000 miles' distance, to consider an
educational experience that does not involve credentials or
curriculum or long-term sequential labor. In immediate terms,
in cities such as Boston and New York, it is unwise and
perhaps destructive to do so. Instead we must face up to

the hard truth that these credentials and measured areas of
expertise and certified ability constitute, as of now, the
irreducible framework for our labor and our struggle.

In speaking of this issue, I find myself in the difficult
position of one who admires Ivan Illich and respects Edward
Reimer, but who also lives in Boston in the year of 1972. I
try to find the meeting place between these widely separated
points of reference in something that I think of as waging
guerilla warfare with credentials.4

In a comprehensive and analytical review of Tools

for Conviviality, Joseph P. Fitzpatrick finds Illich diffi-

 

cult, provocative, frightening, and not at all silly.

Is Illich crazy? Is he a romantic; a dreamer; a prophetic
voice crying in a technological wilderness: Or is he a
keen social analyst who has his finger unmistakably on the
central issue of modern life: Illich would probably say he
is a little bit of all of these. He would firmly deny,
however, that there is anything bizarre or far-out in

what he says. In a few years it will be bearing down pain-
fully on the whole world; in fact it is hearing down pain-
fully on a good part of the world already.

 

3Trevor Beeson, "Dangerszh:De-Schooling," The Christian
Century, LXXXVIII (November 17, 1971), 1341.

4Jonathan Kozol, "Free Schools Fail Because They Don't
Teach," Psychology Today, V (April, 1972), 34.

81

Tools for Conviviality is a concentrated and difficult
book. It is not a finished book, but a book in process.
Illich calls it "an essay submitted for critical comment."
Much of it is familiar to students of the environmental
crisis or of the inhuman quality of the industrial and
consumer society. Some of it, in the Illich style, is
aggravating and provocative. But the singular quality
that Illich brings brilliantly to all his work is his
capacity to call on the rich yield of a wide range of
disciplines from engineering to theology, to coordinate
and concentrate what appear to be unrelated discussions
and ideas and to point out how they focus on one central
issue, in this case the destruction of man by his own '-
tools. When this is examined, as Illich examines it, in
the light of the "word recovered from history," it is a
frightening lesson. And the reader had better be
frightened if he does not wish to be destroyed.5

Herbert Gintis, in an article concerning Deschool-

ing Society, criticized Illich for his lingering emphasis

 

on the negative aspects of society. Although Mr. Gintis
found this methodology of negation effective and at times
forceful, he regretted Illich's lack of projecting a
higher synthesis, one that could incorporate both the
negative and positive aspects of an advanced industrialized
society.6
This highly selective and limited sample of
criticism engendered by Illich's ideas and writings was
included to illustrate the wide array of reactions his work

has precipitated. He has been accused of espousing unreal-

istic and utopian ideas, of incoherent syntax, and of being

 

5Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, "Ivan Illich: Prophet of Hope or
Doom?" America, June 9, 1973, pp. 535, 537.

6Herbert Gintis, "Towards a Political Economy of Education:.
A Radical Critique of Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society," Harvard
Educational Review, XL (1972), 70-96.

82

a mad liberal. More constructively, perhaps, he has been
criticized for his lack of a systematic analysis of the
school and of society, thus providing some scholars with
the ammunition to label him unscientific and consequently,
not to be taken seriously.

It is my opinion that Illich never attempts to
offer organized prescriptions of any kind for the working
out of his ideology because that is not his purpose for
writing and not because he lacks the ability to do so.
However, his attempt to explicate the structure of current
and future society through an analysis of its tools, its
membership, and the relations between them.1acks the con-
tinuing application of a truly structural thesis.

After making an emotional and linguistically
succinct yet descriptive appeal for the creation of a new,
convivial society--one in which each person would achieve
autonomy and personal fulfillment at no expense to any
other individual--Illich states that this society must

include not only convivial tools (those to which all have

 

access) but also at least some manipulative institutions.

It is a mistake to believe that all large tools and all
centralized production would have to be excluded from a
convivial society. It would be equally mistaken to demand
that for the sake of conviviality the distribution of
industrial goods and services must be reduced to the
minimum consistent with survival in order to protect the
maximum equal right to self-determined participation.
Different balances between distributive justice and
participatory justice can prevail in societies equally
striving for post-industrial conviviality, depending on

83

the history, political ideals, and physical resources of
a community.

What is fundamental to a convivial society is not the
total absence of manipulative institutions and addictive
goods and services, but the balance between those tools
that create the specific demands they are specialized to
satisfy and those complementary, enabling tools that
foster self-realization. The first set of tools produces
according to abstract plans for men in general; the other
set enhances the ability of people to pursue their own
goals in their unique way.7

This recommendation could be viewed as the synthesis which
Mr. Gintis found lacking in Illich's ideologY; it could be
viewed as a realistic appraisal of the depth to which
institutions are embedded in our environment. But I tend
to view it as a "cop-out." A structural alteration of
society that changes only the balance between the alienated
and the non-alienated seems to be more a shift in content
than in form.

Illich further states that tools "foster convivi-
ality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by
anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the

8

accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user." But he

goes on to argue that some tools are destructive no matter
who owns thems

Networks of multilane highways, long-range, wide-band-
width transmitters, strip mines, or compulsory school
systems are such tools. Destructive tools must inevitably
increase regimentation, dependence, exploitation, or
impotence, and rob not only the rich but also the poor of

 

7Ivan Illich, "Convivial Tools," Saturday Review of
Education, I (April 14, 1973), 64.

8Illich, Tools for Conviviality, p. 22.

84

conviviality, which is the primary treasure in many so-

called "underdeveloped" areas.9
The logic of Illich's argument is additionally obfuscated
by his claim that:

The issue at hand is not the juridical ownership of tools,

but rather the discovery of the characteristic of some

tools which make it impossible for anybody to "own" them.

The concept of ownership cannot be applied to a tool that

cannot be controlled. The issue at hand, therefore, is

what tools can be controlled in the public interest.

Only secondarily does the question arise whether private

control of a potentially useful tool is in the public

interest.10

There is an obvious linguistic distinction here
between own, use, and control, but is this a logical dis-
tinction in the light of Illich's arguments? If ownership
does not determine control of the tool, what does? Is
access tantamount to control? If the tool is owned by a
relatively few individuals, how will equal public access
be assured? And more important, perhaps, than any of
these questions is the significantly expanded problem of
whether in a truly structural analysis, the central con-
cern should not remain the dynamics of the tool itself,
regardless of its ownership, control, or use.
Illich's explicit investigation becomes less than

perspicuous when he fails to press his distinction between

convivial and manipulative social arrangements to include

all institutions. If some institutions are manipulative,

 

91bid. , p. 26.

loIbid., pp. 25-26.

85

repressive, and perpetuate the institutional dynamic of
self-growth in their participants, why do not all institu-
tions do so? What makes one institution convivial, a
telephone, says Illich, and another, a compulsory school
system, manipulative? Since Illich has adjudicated some
institutions as "good" and some as "not so good," both,
however, being necessary to the balance of a convivial
society, would it be possible to alter the characteristics
of one until it resembled the other? Is this synthesis of
a society very different from the content-changing
humanized technology of Erich Fromm?

Illich's own analysis of the structure of society
falters, I think, for several reasons. First, because
although he articulately advances the necessity of
"counterfoil" research and scientific investigation, he
has neglected to persevere systematically with his own
study of contemporary society. Had Illich applied his
own prescription for continuing analytical research, the
confusion between convivial and non-convivial institutions
would not have been generated. While he had no overwhelm-
ing pangs of modesty when he proposed the vision of a
convivial society, Illich states that:

It would be presumptious for me to define "institutions."

. . . I use the term in the context to which you refer
interchangeably with "tool" to mean a social arrangement
which has been planned for a defined or defineable purpose
and which is still assumed to be under some kind of control

by those who participate bait. In this sense I would not
include (in this narrow sense) "the family" among the basic

86

institutions, but I would do so for the family insofar

as it is the result of codified modern legal prescription.

. . . this of course is only a quick answer, but it tells

you why I purposely try to distinguish manipulative from

"convivial" tools or institutions.11
By refusing to dissect carefully and critically the layers
of meaning from.the term "institution," thereby exposing
its structure, Illich has obscured the very conceptions he
attempts to clarify.

Claude Levi-Strauss believed that the structure of
human nature could be revealed through an intensive
examination of the forms of man's social activities and
relationships. According to Levi-Strauss, the principles
or structure of any one type of institution should serve
as a valid principle or interpretation forother institu-
tions. Because we may be unaware of the structures of our
tools does not mean that they are unstructured. Conse-
quently, according to this body of thought, if the dynamics
of an institution were explicated thoroughly, these same
dynamics could be applied to every other institution.

This is the claim that Illich begins with himself: that

the school is a paradigm institution and by uncovering the
hidden structure of it--its hidden curriculum, its illustra-
tion of learning as a packaged product, its alienating

features, its inculcation on an obliged clientele of

unfulfillable expectations, its unaccessibility to most of

 

11Personal letter from Ivan Illich to the author, December 7,
1973.

87

the world's population--by depicting these characteristics
of this sample institution, its structure, the hidden
structure of society would be set forth and a new society
could be created. Illich's rhetoric illustrates the
similar beliefs of Levi-Strauss, Marx, and others that
once the forms of man's social arrangements have been por-
trayed, the nature of man himself will be apparent.
Implicit in one's beliefs concerning the nature of man is,
of course, a conception of whether the moral dimensions of
social systems and organized forms have a rational base.
The choice of commitment to a moral community rather than
the accident of belonging to a descriptive one is,
apparently, rooted in reason. The structuralists, however,
do seem to favor the view that ethics do not necessarily
have to be based on a considered and rational choice. The
controversy is too complex to be treated here. Marx
believed that a man was the ensemble of his social rela-
tionships; Illich acts on this belief in his attempt to
dissect those relationships, to bring their organization
to the awareness of all men so that certain changes might
be effected in them, and a new structure be created. In
Illich's view the new arrangements would enable new ethics
to evolve, ethics that are based on freedom.and justice
and survival.

However, Illich's theories never attain the goals.

he has proposed because he does not maintain his structural

88

analysis consistently. Instead of applying the specific
delineation of characteristics between institutions and
convivial groups (communities) to all institutions and
adhering, thusly, to an authentically structural point of
view-—that society is composed of separate types of social
arrangements, the community and the institution, Illich

has presented a quantitative rather than a qualitative
perspective. In the former, reform is carried out through
the achievement of a happy medium between institutional and
communitarian structures within a group in which

efficiency can generally be determined as the measurement
of balance between them. He articulates the view that
society is composed of separate elements, institutions and
communities, but under analysis his theory can be dissected
to show that a truly convivial society is one in which
communities, convivial institutions, and non-convivial
"institutions exist together, and the difference among

these is one of content and not truly of form.

The second weakness evident in Illich's analysis is
his confusion of process with form. In his effort to
explicate the evils of a society in which escalating pro-
duction and unlimited demands debilitate individual dignity
and autonomy, Illich has proposed the necessity for self-
limitation--limitation that would be voluntarily undertaken
by each member of a convivial society so that all members
could participate more fully in all aspects of responsible

living.

89

Illich condemns the bureaucracies of education,
health care, and transportation as examples of service
institutions which have passed beyond the boundary of
giving service to more people than they restrict from
obtaining their services. The reformation which Illich
proposes to counter this situation involves the transfer
of labor from a few to a multitude. The reorganization of
energy is seen by Illich as an integral part of decentrali-
zation. Less energy would be spent by machines and‘more'

would be spent by people; science could be employed to

simplify tools in order to enable the layman to

"12

shape his immediate environment to his taste rather

than depending upon science to develop a technology that

. will be used for the further promotion of the

"13

specialized worker. Illich views the use by a society

of a majority of power tools, such as cars, air condi-
tioners, etc., as a principle source of injustice.

In a modern society, energy inputs represent one of the
major new liberties. Each man's ability to produce
change depends on his ability to control lowbentropy
energy. On this control of energy depends his right to
give his meaning to the physical environment. His ability
to act toward the future he chooses depends on his control
of the energy that gives shape to that future. Equal
freedom in a society that uses large amounts of environ-
mental energy means equal control over the transformation
of that energy and not just an equal claim to what has
been done with it.

Most of the power tools now in use favor centraliza-
tion of control. . . .

 

12Illich, Tools for Conviviality, p. 34.

131bid.

90

The principal source of injustice in our epoch is
political approval for the existence of tools that by
their very nature restrict to a very few the liberty
to use them in an autonomous way.14

The reorganization of energy necessitates a change
in the production activities of a society. Illich has
posited an expansion of individual labor-energy and a
diminution of the energy expended by powerful tools which
are centrally controlled by an elite. Thus far the
analysis seems to be structural in perspective. However,
the methods by which these reforms can be initiated
according to Illich do not, I think, justify his claims
to having developed an adequate structuralist critique.
If there is a conceptual difference between process and
structure, I believe that Illich is primarily concerned'
with addressing himself to providing a procedure for con-
vivial living rather than to the actual reorganization of
society in terms of economic and technological arrange-
ments which might generate some structural changes in
social organizations and ideology.

Illich identifies six ways in which all people are
threatened by industrial development after such develop-
ment has passed through the "second watershed".

l. Overgrowth threatens the right to the fundamental

physical structure of the environment with which man has

evolved.

2. Industrialization threatens the right to convivial
work.

 

14Ibid., pp. 42-43.

91
3. The overprogramming of man for the new environment
deadens his creative imagination.

4. New levels of productivity threaten the right to
participatory politics.

5. Enforced obsolescence threatens the right to
tradition: the recourse to precedent in language, myth,
morals, and judgment. . . .

6. Pervasive frustration by means of compulsory though
engineered satisfaction constitutes a sixth and more subtle
threat.15

Recovery from such an appalling situation depends
according to Illich on the political process of the
society; if political interaction can be reorganized so
that access to participation is available to everyone and
laws can be initiated to establish the necessary limita-
tions on production and bureaucracy, then man may survive.

The intercourse of politics has lost its vitality
because of an idolatry of science, a corruption of the
ordinary language, and a legal procedure whose main raison
d'etre is the support of an ever-expanding productive
society. "The procedure by which people decide what ought
to be done has become subservient to the ideology that
corporations ought to produce more: more knowledge and

"16 The rhetoric of

decisions, more goods and services.
reform involves process rather than economic conditions.
Illich sees the formal process as a convivial tool.

It is distinct from the purpose for which it is used;

 

15Ibid., p. 48.

16Ibid., p. 92.

92

however, currently it has been convoluted into a most
effective and efficient instrument for the social control
of people at the service of expanding tools.

Most of the present laws and present legislators, most

of the present courts and their decisions, most of the

claimants and their demands are deeply corrupted by an

overarching industrial consensus: that more is better,

and that corporations serve the public interest better

than men. But this entrenched consensus does not invali-

date my thesis that any revolution which neglects the

use of formal legal and political procedures will fail.

Only an active majority in which all individuals and groups

insist for their own reasons on their own rights, and whose

members share convivial procedure, can recover the rights

of men against corporations.17

The criticisms of contemporary society which Illich

sets forth are justified, I think, and it is in his evaluation
of our social arrangements that he achieves an articulation
and description rare in pedagogical criticisms. Certainly
he is a leader of political inversion through the recovered
use of language. His personal blend of scientific theory
and creative imagination depicts man's crisis of survival
with frightening clarity. It is this ability to make
society aware of itself, its sicknesses as well as its
potential strengths, that makes Illich a critic of enormous
stature, one to be taken seriously, and one from whom
there is much creative ability still to be organized for
the welfare of all men.

The principles upon which a convivial society are

founded are admirable and evidence an upward evolution of

 

17Ibid., pp. 93-99.

93

ethical conduct rooted in responsibility both individual
and communitarian. However, Illich's claim to have pre-
sented a structuralist theory on which structural changes
can be based is unjustified. His analysis of society
commences from a structural perspective but its final form
is substantive. The emphasis of his thought is actually
on creating a society in which a balance of forces exists--
some communitarian, some institutional, and some repre-
sentative of both social arrangements. The revolution
which gives birth to such a society will consist of an"
inversion of political processes, making them more respon-
sive to the wishes of a greater number of people. This
argument fails to justify Illich as a structuralist rather
than a reformer, and consequently, his delineation of the
nature of man as depicted through the forms of man's
relationship to his environment is not adequately vindi-
cated.

An ideology of deschooling cannot, I think, be
entirely comprehended from Illich's writings to date.
Unless the distinction between institution and community
is adhered to for all institutions, not just those for
whom the distinction works best, the posture of disestab-
lishing schools in favor of more communitarian educational
ventures (conviviaI enterprises) cannot be justified on
any but emotional and vaguely humanistic grounds. De-

schooling and retooling may not belong to a utopian vision,

94

but support for their existence now cannot be based on the
empirical data or logical analysis which Illich has thus
far produced.

The underlying premise of Illich's criticism is
that the dominant institutions of a society determine and
shape the schools; therefore, an alteration of those
institutions would effect a corresponding change in.the
schools. However, the change Illich seems to be proposing
is one of the behavior of the institutions through politi-
cal participation and not in the structural forms of
institutions themselves. By uncritically amalgamating
the two elements of structure and substance, Illich has

devitalized the case for deschooling and retooling.

REFERENCES

95

REFERENCES

Works by Ivan Illich

 

Books

Illich, Ivan. Celebration of Awareness. New York: Doubleday and
Company, 1970.

. Deschooling society. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

The Church, Change and Development. New York: Herder and
Herder, 1970.

. Tools fOr Conviviality. New York: Harper and Row., 1973.

, et al. After Deschooling, What? New York: Harper and Row,
1973.

Articles and Pamphlets

 

. "Abolishing Schools: 1." New Ybrk Times, May 3, 1971, p. 3.
"Abolishing Schools: II." New Bork Times, May 4, 1971, p. 4.

. "Boot Camp for Urbanites." Time, LXXVIII (October 27, 1961),
65.

. "Convivial Tools." Saturday Review of Education, I (April 14,
1973), 63-67.

"Deschooling." Peace News, December 24, 1971, pp. 8-10.

. "De-Schooling the Teaching Orders." America, CXXIV
(January 9, 1971), 12-14.

. "Draft for an Address to the American Educational Research
Association Meeting in New York, February 6, 1971." CIDOC,
Doc. A/E 71/282. Cuernavaca, Mexico: Centro Intercultural
de Documentacion, 1971.

. "Education: A Consumer Commodity and a Pseudo—Religion."
The Christian Century, LXXXVIII (December 14, 1971), 1464--
1468.

96

97

. "Education Without Schools: How It Can Be Done." New
York Review of Books, XV (January 7, 1971), 25-31.

. "False Ideology of Schooling." Saturday Review, LIII
(October 17, 1970), 56-58.

. "Futility of Schooling in Latin America." Saturday Review,
LI (April 20, 1968), 56-59.

. "How Will We Pass on Christianity?" The Critic, January-
February, 1972, pp. 14-21.

. "1970 Beecher Lectures." CIDOC, Cuaderno No. 1002.
Cuernavaca, Mexico: Centro Intercultural de Documentacion,
1970. (These are lectures, now printed in pamphlet form,
which Illich delivered at the Divinity School of Yale
University on February 16-18, 1970.)

"On Style: The Root of Dissonance, Deviance, and Delinquency."
CIDOC, Doc. I/V, 72/26. Cuernavaca, Mexico: Centro
Intercultural de Documentacion, 1972.

"Retooling Society." CIDOC, Doc. A/E, 72/369. Cuernavaca,
Mexico: Centro Intercultural de Documentacion, 1972.

. "Should We Abolish Our Schools?" weekend Magazine, October
24, 1970, pp. 10-13.

. "The Alternative to Schooling." Saturday Review, LIV
'(June 19, 1971), 44-48, 59-60.

. "The Breakdown of Schools: A Problem or a Symptom?" Inter-
change, II (1971), 1-10.

. "The Individuals as Institution." Harper's Magazine,
September, 1972, pp. 27-29.

. "The Need for Counterfoil Research." CIDOC, Couchiching,
June, 1969. (This is a paper presented at the Couchiching
Conference.) .

. "The Need for Cultural Revolution." The Great Ideas Today,
1970. New York: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1970,
pp 0 28-43 9

"The Seamy Side of Charity." America, CLVI (January 21,
1967), 88-91. (This also appears in Celebration of Awareness.)

"The Vanishing Clergyman." The Critic, XXV (June-July,
1967), 18-27. (This also appears in Celebration of’Awareness.)

98

. "This Book is about Schools." The New Ybrk Times Book
Review, March 21, 1971, pp. 47-48.

. "To Hell with Good Intentions." Risk, IV (1970), 18-26.

. "Toward a Society Without Schools." Center Report (Center
for Study of Democratic Institutions), IV (February, 1971),
3-6 a

. "Why We Must Abolish Schooling." New Ybrk Review of Books,
XV (July 2, 1970), 9-15.

, and Reimer, E. "Alternatives in Education; Proposal for a
Planning Seminar Aimed at the Development of Basic Educational
Alternatives." CIDOC, Cuaderno No. 1014. Cuernavaca,

Mexico: Centro Intercultural de Documentacion, 1971.

Foerster, H. V.; Maturana, H.; et al. "Interpersonal
Relational Networks." CIDOC, Cuaderno No. 1014. Cuernavaca,
Mexico: Centro Intercultural de Documentacion, 1971.

Interviews, Letters and Tapes

 

Cowan, Wayne H. "An Interview with Ivan Illich." Christianity and
Crisis, XXIX (August, 1969), 213-219.

Illich, Ivan. "Alternatives in Education." An audio-tape, about two
hours. For information: Mr. Reg Herman, Managing Editor,
Convergence, P.O. Box 250, Station F, Toronto 5, Ontario.

"Ivan Illich Challenges Education." An audio-tape. For
information: Argus Communications, 3505 No. Ashland,
Chicago, Illinois.

. "The Institutionalization of Truth." A video-tape of a
lecture, about 55 minutes, delivered in the spring of 1970 at
York University in Toronto, Canada. For information: Mr. Reg
Herman, Managing Editor, Convergence, P.O. Box 250, Station F,
Toronto 5, Ontario. '

, and Cogley, John. "Yesterday I Could Not Sleep Because
Yesterday I Wrote My Name." An audio-tape, 42 minutes. For
information: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions,
P.O. Box 4446, Santa Barbara, California 93103. Order as
Tape #299.

, McDonald, D., and Goulet, D. "A Privileged Place." An audio-
tape, 21 minutes. For information: Center for the Study of
Democratic Institutions, P.O. Box 4446, Santa Barbara,
California 93103.

99

"Ivan Illich Writes Pape Paul." Commonweal, XCII (September 4, 1970),
428-429.

Letter from Ivan Illich to the author, dated April 17, 1973.
Letter from Ivan Illich to the author, dated December 7, 1973.

"Mbnsignor Illich's Letter to Cardinal Seper." America, CXX
(February 15, 1969), 187-189.

Murphy, Helen. "A Conversation with Ivan Illich." McGill Reporter,
April 10, 1970, pp. 1, 12—17.

Ohlinger, John, et al. "Telephone Conversation with Ivan Illich."
An audio-tape ofa35 minute amplified telephone conversation
made from Columbus, Ohio to Cuernavaca, Mexico on April 16,
1971.

Selected Documents from CIDOC, containing seminar papers by
IlIich and others on fhe topic of Alternatives in
Education:

 

CIDOC Documenta, Alternatives in Education. Cuaderno No. 75, 1
(July, 1970-June, 1971). Cuernavaca, Mexico: Centro
Intercultural de Documentacion, 1972.

CIDOC Documenta, Alternatives in Education. Cuaderno No. 76, 2
(July, 1970-June, 1971). Cuernavaca, Mexico: Centro
Intercultural de Documentacion, 1972.

CIDOC Documenta, Alternatives in Education. Cuaderno No. 77, 1
(July, l97l-June, 1972). Cuernavaca, Mexico: Centro
Intercultural de Documentacion, 1972.

CIDOC Documenta, Alternatives in Education. Cuaderno No. 78, 2
(July, l97l-June, 1972). Cuernavaca, Mexico: Centro
Intercultural de Documentacion, 1972.

100

Other References

Books and Manuscripts

Aries, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family
Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.

Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. New York: Ballantine Books,
1973.

De George, Richard and De George, Fernande, eds. The Structuralists
From Marx to Levi-Strauss. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and
Company, 1972.

Edwards, Stewart, ed. Selected writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
Garden City, N. Y. : Doubleday and Company, 1969.

Fromm, Eric. Escape From Freedom. New York: Avon Books, 1972.
. The Revolution of Hope. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.
Goodman, Paul. Compulsory Miseducation. London: Penguin Books, 1971.
. Growing Up Absurd. New York: Vintage Books, 1960.

. New Refbrmation: Notes of a Neolithic conservative.
New York: Random House, 1970.

Grandstaff, Marvin. Historical Perspectives on NOn-Formal Education.
Program of Studies in Non-Formal Education, Study Team Report.
East Lansing: Michigan State University, April, 1974.

. "Structural Socialization and Education." Unpublished
manuscript. East Lansing: Michigan State University, n.d.

Greer, Colin. The Great School Legend. New York: Basic Books, Inc.,
1972.

Harris, Marvin. The Rise of Anthropological Theory. New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1968.

Holt, John. Freedom and Beyond. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co.,
Inc., 1972.

Kallenberg, A. G. Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society; A Study of the
Literature. The Hague, Netherlands: The Centre of the Study
of Education in Changing Societies (CESO), November, 1973.

Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. commitment and Community. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1972. '

101

Kropotkin, Petr. Mutual Aid. Boston: Extending Horizons Books, n.d.

Levine, Daniel 0., and Havinghurst, Robert J., eds. Farewell to
Schools? Werthington, Ohio: Charles A. Jones Publishing
Co., 1971.

Marcuse, Herbert. Five Lectures. Boston: Beacon Press, 1970.
. One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.

Marien, Michael D. Alternative Futures for Learning: An Annotated
Bibliography of Trends, Forecasts and Proposals. Syracuse,
N.Y.: Educational Policy Research Center, 1971.

McLuhan, Marshall. understanding Media: The Extensions of'Man.
New York: The New American Library, Inc., 1964.

Minar, David, and Greer, Scott, eds. The Concept of community.
Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1969.

Nelson, J. L. et al., eds. Radical Ideas and the Sehools.
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Company, 1972.

Noyes, John Humphrey. History of'American socialisms. New York:
Hillary House Publishers, Ltd., 1961.

Ohlinger, John. Bibliography of Comments on the Illich-Rainer
Deschooling Theses (second draft copy). Columbus: Ohio
State University, College of Education, August, 1972.

Ohlinger, John, and McCarthy, C. Lifelong Learning of Lifelong
Schooling? A Tentative View of the Ideas of Ivan Illich
with a Quotational Bibliography. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse
University Publications, 1971.

Peters, R. 8. Ethics and Education. Atlanta: Scott, Foresman and
Co., 1967.

Reimer, Everett. School is Dead: Alternatives in Education. Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, 1971.

Rosak, Theodore. Where the wasteland Ends. Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday and Company, 1972.

Schindler, Charles Raymond. "A Philosophical Analysis of Ivan Illich's
Construct 'Deschooling Society' and Related Terms." unpub-
lished Ph.D. Dissertation, Michigan State University, 1972.

Silberman, Charles. Crisis in the Classroom. New York: Vintage Books,
1971.

102

Articles

Akass, Jon. "Damn You, Eton, for Being so Reasonable." The Sun,
October 25, 1971, p. 3.

Albacete, Lorenzo. "Deschooling Illich." Triumph, November, 1971,
pp 0 32-34 0

Anderson, John. "The Myth of Unending Consumption." The Times Educa-
tional Supplement, London, November 12, 1971, p. 24.

Bascom St. John, J. "The Indispensable Institution." Interchange,
II (1971), 71-81.

Bauer, N. J. "Deschooling Society, Uncovering Illich." Kappa Delta
Pi Record, IX (1972), 6-8.

Beckler, J. "Illich's Attack on Formal Schooling Echoes in Congress."
School Management, September, 1971, p. 4.

Beeson, Trevor. "Dangers in De-Schooling." The Christian Century,
LXXXVIII (November 17, 1971), 1341.

Bereiter, Carl. "A Proposal to Abolish Education." Means and Ende in
Education. Edited by B. Crittenden. Toronto: Ontario
Institute for Studies in Education, 1969, pp. 62-70.

. "A Time to Experiment with Alternatives in Education."
General Subcommittee on Education, Committee on Education and
Labor. U.S. House of Representatives, Needs of Elementary and
Secondary Education for the Seventies. Washington, D.C.:

U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970, pp. 29-35.

. "Education and the Pursuit of Reality." Interchange, II
(1971), 44-50.

. "Moral Alternatives to Education." Interchange, III (1972),
25-41.

. "Schools Without Education." Harvard Educational Review,
XLII (1972), 390-413.

Bishop, Jordan. "Schools under Fire: The Success and the Failure of an
Ideology." CIDOC, Cuaderno No. 1015. Cuernavaca, Mexico:
Centro Intercultural de Documentacion, 1971.

, and Spring, Joel. "Formative Undercurrents of Compulsory
Knowledge." CIDOC, Cuaderno No. 1011. Cuernavaca, Mexico:
Centro Intercultural de Documentacion, 1970.

103

Bliss, Shepherd. "Ivan Illich and CIDOC is Theater." Christian
Century, LXXXVII (December 2, 1970)": 1463-1466. .

"Camera and Illich." Commonweal, LXXXIX (February 7, 1969), 575-576.

Castan, Frances. "Is There a Right Not to Go to School?" The Educa-
tion Digest, XXXVIII (January, 1973), 9-12.

Champion, D. R. "Of Many Things: Center for Intercultural Documenta-
tion at Cuernavaca, Out of Bounds to Priests and Religious."
America, CXX (February 1, 1969), 120.

"Controversial Priest: Ivan Illich: Man in the News." The new york
Times, January 23, 1969, p. 2.

Cuneo, Paul K. "Review of Celebration of Awareness." Shturday
Review, February 13, 1971, pp. 28-29.

Davy, John. "The Man Who Wants to Scrap Schools." The critic
January-February, 1972, pp. 22-26.

Dolan, Dan. "Life of Ivan Illich." new'Republic, CLX (March 1, 1969),
18-19.

Duane, Michael. "Aspects of Deschooling." Children's Rights,
London, I (November, 1971), 4-8.

Du Plessix Gray, Francine. "Profiles: The Rules of the Game."
The New Ybrker, XLVI (April 25, 1970), 40-92.

Eddington, Everett. "Ivan Illich and CIDOC: Impressions of a
Participant Observer." A paper given at Syracuse University,
April, 1972.

Feigin, N. R. "Letters to the Education Editor." saturdag Review,
LIV (July 17, 1971), 42.

Fields, J. "Sour Apples in Eden: Ivan Illich at Work." Teachers
College Record, LXXIII (1971/1972), 107-115.

Fiske, Edward B. "Head of Cultural Center Tells of Secret Hearing in
Vatican." The New York Times, February 4, 1969, p. 2.

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