His many books always caused me to reconsider.
Brian McAndrews
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 12:14:47 -0500
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Skip Hills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Illich Obit.
December 4, 2002
Ivan Illich, 76, Philosopher Who Challenged Status Quo, Is Dead
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
van Illich, a onetime Roman Catholic priest who, through a steady
flow of books and articles preached counterintuitive sociology to a
disquieted baby-boom generation, died on Monday at his home in
Bremen, Germany. He was 76.
Celia Samerski, a student of his at the University of Bremen, said
the specific cause of death was not known. She said he also had a
home in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Mr. Illich was perhaps best known for his 1971 book, "De-Schooling
Society," which protested mandatory public education and the
institutionalization of learning. Along with works like Paul
Goodman's, "Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized
Society," published in 1960, it provided grist for a society's
growing ambivalence about educational institutions and much else.
Mr. Illich was a priest who thought there were too many priests, a
lifelong educator who argued for the end of schools and an
intellectual sniper from a perch with a wide view. He argued that
hospitals cause more sickness than health, that people would save
time if transportation were limited to bicycles and that historians
who rely on previously published material perpetuate falsehoods.
His intellectual ordnance of anarchist panache, hatred of
bureaucracy, Jesuitic argumentation, deep reverence for the past and
watered-down Marxism, was applied to many targets, including
relations between the sexes. More often than not, his conclusions
were startling: he thought life was better for women in pre-modern
times.
Critics often picked holes in his complex, verbose arguments, but
not a few hailed them as illuminating critiques of large problems.
Anatole Broyard, writing in The New York Times in 1971, said that
his nitpicks were "like criticizing the grammar of someone who has
just delivered a speech that gave us goose pimples."
But after his 1970's heyday, interest in Mr. Illich's ideas appeared
to wane. Speaking invitations declined, and even some that still
came dripped with nostalgia: Mayor Jerry Brown of Oakland, who was
called Governor Moonbeam when he was governor of California and
consorted with out-of-the-box thinkers like R. Buckminster Fuller
and Mr. Illich, invited him to a conference in 2000.
By 1989, Mr. Broyard wrote in an article about winnowing books from
his library that he would "especially" discard Mr. Illich's works.
Mr. Illich was born on Sept. 4, 1926, in Vienna. He is survived by
two brothers, Micha, of Manhattan. and Sascha, of Nantucket, Mass.
His father, a civil engineer, descended from Dalmatian royalty. His
mother was a Sephardic Jew, and Ivan was expelled from a school in
Vienna in 1941 because of her background. He went on to study in
Florence and Rome and in Salzburg, where he wrote his doctoral
dissertation on the historian Arnold Toynbee.
Mr. Illich came to the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan
in 1952 after being ordained as a priest in Rome. He particularly
attended to the needs of Puerto Ricans, helping establish an
employment agency among other things. In an interview with The New
Yorker magazine in 1970, the Rev. John Connolly, one of his
colleagues, called him "their Babe Ruth."
The article said that early in his career as a priest, Father Illich
began to criticize the church for "its smugness, its bureaucracy and
its chauvinism." But his energy and intellect propelled him to the
position of vice rector of the Catholic University of Ponce in
Puerto Rico. He was forced out in 1960 for opposing the local
bishop's forbidding of Catholics to vote for a governor who
advocated state-sponsored birth control.
After being recalled briefly to New York, he was assigned to
Cuernavaca, a small city 50 miles west of Mexico City where he
established the Intercultural Center for Documentation to teach
priests and laymen who wanted to become Latin American volunteers.
Mr. Illich's criticisms of church doctrine ranged beyond his
advocacy of birth control, and in 1969 he was branded "politically
immoral" by the Vatican and left the priesthood.
Among other things, he disagreed with the church policy of
increasing the number of priests in Latin America. He believed that
the church could be revived only by lay people, a populist view that
he later applied first to education and then to other institutions.
"Illich is not against schools or hospitals as such, but once a
certain threshold of institutionalization is reached, schools make
people more stupid, while hospitals make them sick," wrote Matthias
Finger and Jose Manuel Asu'n in "Adult Education at the Crossroads:
Learning Our Way Out" (Zed Books, 2001).
"And more generally, beyond a certain threshold of institutionalized
expertise, more experts are counterproductive - they produce the
counter effect of what they set out to achieve," they continued.
Mr. Illich's sweeping conclusions struck some readers as too
sweeping, and others as plain wrong. Peter Sparkman in The New York
Times Book Review in 1971 criticized "De-Schooling Society" as not
only "a mind-bending litany of abstraction" but as a distraction
from schools' all too real problems. He called it "an exceedingly
bad book written by an exceedingly good man."
But Mr. Illich relished surprise, and his ideas almost always did.
"We must have a sarcastic readiness for all surprises," he said in
The New Yorker interview, "including the ultimate surprise of death."
Copyright The New York Times Company
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* Skip Hills *
* Faculty of Education, Queen's University *
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* Brian McAndrews, Practicum Coordinator *
* Faculty of Education, Queen's University *
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* "Education is not the filling of a pail, *
* but the lighting of a fire. *
* W.B.Yeats *
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