Ivan Illich: deschooling, conviviality

and lifelong learning

Ivan Illich: deschooling, conviviality and  lifelong learning.

Known for his critique of modernization and the corrupting
impact of institutions, Ivan Illich’s concern with deschooling,
learning webs and the disabling effect of professions has struck a
chord among many informal educators. We explore key aspects
of his theory and his continuing relevance for informal
education and lifelong learning.

contents: introduction · early life · ivan illich and cidoc · later work and

life · ivan illich on institutionalization and commodification · illich’s convivial
alternative · conclusion · further reading and references · links
Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the
schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance.
Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment
there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is
thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement
with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to
say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place
of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the
improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise
for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning,
dignity, independence, and creative endeavour are defined as little more
than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and
their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the
management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question. Ivan
Illich Deschooling Society (1973: 9)
Ivan Illich (1926 – 2002) rose to fame in the 1970s with a series of
brilliant, short, polemical, books on major institutions of the industrialized
world. They explored the functioning and impact of ‘education’ systems
(Deschooling Society), technological development (Tools for Conviviality),
energy, transport and economic development(Energy and Equity), medicine
(Medical Nemesis), and work (The Right to Useful Unemployment and its
Professional Enemies; and Shadow Work). Ivan Illich’s lasting contribution
was a dissection of these institutions and a demonstration of their corruption.
Institutions like schooling and medicine had a tendency to end up working in
ways that reversed their original purpose. Illich was later to explore gender,
literacy and pain. However, his work was the subject of attack from both the
left and right. In the case of the former, for example, his critique of the
disabling effect of many of the institutions of welfare state was deeply
problematic. From the 1980s on he became something of a forgotten figure,
although there were always a number of writers and practitioners in the fields
he wrote about who found significant possibility in his analysis. Andrew Todd
and Franco La Cecla (2002) have commented that his great contribution was
as an archaeologist of ideas, ‘someone who helped us to see the present in a
truer and richer perspective’. In this piece we examine his legacy.

Early life

Ivan Illich was born in Vienna. His father, Ivan Peter, was a civil engineer.
This meant that Ivan Illich, along with his younger, twin brothers were able to
live comfortably, attend good schools and travel extensively in Europe (Smith
and Smith 1994: 434). Illich was a student at the Piaristengymnasium in
Vienna from 1936 to1941, but was expelled by the occupying Nazis in 1941
because his mother had Jewish ancestry (his father was a Roman Catholic).
From this point on Ivan Illich became something of a wandered – travelling
the world and having the minimum of material possessions. He completed his
pre-university studies in Florence, and then went on to study histology and
crystallography at the University of Florence. At this point Ivan Illich decided
to enter and prepare for the priesthood. Her went to study theology and
philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome (1943-6). In 1951 he
completed his PhD at the University of Salzburg (an exploration of the nature
of historical knowledge). One of the intellectual legacies of this period was a
developing understanding of the institutionalization of the church in the 13th
century – and this helped to form and inform his later critique.
 On completing his PhD Ivan Illich began
work as a priest in Washington Heights, New York. He was there until 1956.
His congregation was largely Irish and Puerto Rican. In Washington Heights,
Ivan Illich was soon speaking out for Puerto Rican culture, ‘and against
“cultural ignorance” on the part of the dominant culture’ (Smith and Smith
1994: 434, see, also, Illich’s reflections inCelebration of Awareness, pp. 29 –
38). He had become fluent in Spanish and several other languages (during his
life he was to work in 10 different languages).

Ivan Illich and the Centre for Intercultural Documentation

(CIDOC)

Ivan Illich then went onto to be vice rector of the Catholic University of Ponce
in Puerto Rico. However, he spent only four years there, being forced out of
the university in 1960 because of his opposition to the then Bishop of Ponce’s
forbidding of Catholics to vote for Governor Luis Munoz Marin (because of his
advocacy of state-sponsored birth control). Illich founded the Centre for
Intercultural Formation (initially at Fordham University) to train American
missionaries for work in Latin America. While still committed to the Church,
Ivan Illich was deeply opposed to Pope John XXIII’s 1960 call for north
American missionaries to ‘modernize’ the Latin American Church. He wanted
missionaries to question their activities, learn Spanish, to recognize and
appreciate the limitations of their own (cultural) experiences, and ‘develop
assumptions that would allow them to assume their duties as self-proclaimed
adult educators with humility and respect’ (Smith and Smith 1994: 435).

From the start he wanted the institution to be based in Latin America – and
after walking and hitchhiking several thousand miles he decided on
Cuernavaca, Mexico. With the help of Feodora Stancioff and Brother Gerry
Morris he set up shop. The Centre was renamed Centre for Intercultural
Documentation (CIDOC) and provided an opportunity for several hundred
missionaries each year to join, in Ivan Illich’s words, ‘a free club for the search
of surprise, a place where people go who want to have help in redefining their
questions rather than completing the answers they have gotten’ (quoted in
Smith and Smith 1994: 435). The critical and questioning stance of the Centre,
and its freewheeling ways of work in began to cause some concern amongst
key elements of the Catholic hierarchy. Illich was not one to mince his words:

Upon the opening of our centre I stated two of the purposes of our undertaking. The first
was to help diminish the damage threatened by the papal order. Through our
educational programme for missionaries we intended to challenge them to face reality
and themselves, and either refuse their assignments or – if they accepted – to be a little
bit less unprepared. Secondly, we wanted to gather sufficient influence among the
decision-making bodies of mission sponsoring agencies to dissuade them from
implementing [Pope John XIII’s] plan. (Illich 1973b: 47-8)

Ivan Illich was ordered by the Vatican to leave CIDOC, but he managed to hold
out – eventually resigning all offices and church salaries, and then leaving the
priesthood in 1969. The Centre had broadened its appeal considerably – and
became known for explorations of the many the themes that have become
identified with Illich.
Illich’s concerns around the negative impact of schooling hit a chord – and he
was much in demand as a speaker. His books, The Celebration of
Awareness and Deschooling Society brought his thinking to a much wider
audience – as did the work of CIDOC colleagues such as Everett Reimer
(1971). His chronicling of the negative effects of schools and his development
of a critique of the ‘radical monopoly’ of the dominant technologies of
education in Deschooling Society (1973) echoed concerns held well beyond
libertarian and anarchist circles. He went on to apply his critique to energy
consumption (Energy and Equity – 1974), and memorably to medical
treatment (in Medical Nemesis – 1976). In Tools for Conviviality (1975), Illich
provided a more general exploration of his concerns and critique and offered
some possible standards by which to judge ‘development’ (with an emphasis
on mutuality, human-scale technology etc.). Throughout he infused his work
with an ecological understanding.

Later work and life

Interest in his ideas within education began to wane. Invitations to speak and
to write slackened, and as the numbers of missionaries headed for Latin
America fell away, CIDOC began to fade. Illich’s thinking did not resonate
with dominant mood in the discourses of northern education systems. At a
time when there was increasing centralized control, an emphasis on
nationalized curricula, and a concern to increase the spread of the
bureaucratic accreditation of learning, his advocacy of deinstitutionalization
(deschooling) and more convivial forms of education was hardly likely to make
much ground.

Ivan Illich’s later work ranged across a number of areas – but have generally
carried forward the central themes of his earlier work. The pieces in Toward a
History of Needs (1978) and Shadow Work (1981) largely look to the
economics of scarcity, (i.e. that the predominant dynamic in both ‘developed’
and ‘under-developed’ economies lies in the desire to profit through the
provision of goods and services in sectors where there is a ‘scarcity, rather
than the wish to share subsistence). Gender (1982) looks to the social
experiences of female/male complementarity. In the mid- to late 1980s Ivan
Illich turned to and exploration of literacy practices in ABC: The
Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1988) and in In the Vineyard of the
Text (1993).
Ivan Illich had set himself against building up a school of followers (Finger
and Asún 2001: 7). However, as Carl Mitcham has argued, his thought and life
have had an influence on a small, but close circle of friends (see Ivan Illich
Studies below). Representative of what might be called the Illich community
of reflection are, for example, Barbara Duden’s The Woman Beneath the Skin:
A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany, Wolfgang Sachs’ The
Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, Lee Hoinacki’s El
Camino: Walking to Santiago de Compostela and David Schwartz’sWho
Cares? Rediscovering Community.
After the 1980s Ivan Illich divided his time between Mexico, the United States,
and Germany. Currently he was a Visiting Professor of Philosophy and of
Science, Technology, and Society at Penn State – and also taught at the
University of Bremen. He continued to live frugally and ‘opened his doors to
collaborators and drop-ins with great generosity, running a practically non-
stop educational process which was always celebratory, open-ended and
egalitarian’ (Todd and La Cecla 2002). He engaged in a ‘heroic level of activity’
– in the early 1990s he was diagnosed as having cancer. True to his thinking
(as expressed, for example, in Medical Nemesis) he insisted on administering
his own medication. This was against the advice of his doctors, ‘who proposed
a largely sedative treatment which would have rendered his work impossible’
(Todd and La Cecla 2002). He was able to finish a history of pain (which will
be published in French in 2003).
Ivan Illich died on December 2, 2002.

Institutionalization, expert power, commodification and

counterproductivity

As Ian Lister commented in his introduction to After Deschooling,

What? (Illich 1976: 6), the central, coherent feature of Ivan Illich’s work on
deschooling is a critique of institutions and professionals – and the way in
which they contribute to dehumanization. ‘[I]nstitutions create the needs and
control their satisfaction, and, by so doing, turn the human being and her or
his creativity into objects’ (Finger and Asún 2001: 10). Ivan Illich’s anti-
institutional argument can be said to have four aspects (op. cit.):
A critique of the process of institutionalization. Modern societies
appear to create more and more institutions – and great swathes of the way we
live our lives become institutionalized. ‘This process undermines people – it
diminishes their confidence in themselves, and in their capacity to solve
problems… It kills convivial relationships. Finally it colonizes life like a
parasite or a cancer that kills creativity’ (Finger and Asún 2001: 10).
A critique of experts and expertise. Ivan Illich’s critique of experts and
professionalization was set out in Disabling Professions(1977a) and in his
exploration of the expropriation of health in Medical Nemesis (1975b). The
latter book famously began, ‘The medical establishment has become a major
threat to health’ (ibid.: 11). The case against expert systems like modern health
care is that they can produce damage which outweigh potential benefits; they
obscure the political conditions that render society unhealthy ; and they tend
top expropriate the power of individuals to heal themselves and to shape their
environment (op. cit.). Finger and Asún (2001: 10) set out some of the
elements:
Experts and an expert culture always call for more experts. Experts also have a tendency
to cartelize themselves by creating ‘institutional barricades’ – for example proclaiming
themselves gatekeepers, as well as self-selecting themselves. Finally, experts control
knowledge production, as they decide what valid and legitimate knowledge is, and how
its acquisition is sanctioned.

A critique of commodification. Professionals and the institutions in

which they work tend to define an activity, in this case learning, as a
commodity (education), ‘whose production they monopolize, whose
distribution they restrict, and whose price they raise beyond the purse of
ordinary people and nowadays, all governments’ (Lister in Illich 1976: 8). Ivan
Illich put it this way:

Schooling – the production of knowledge, the marketing of knowledge, which is what

the school amounts to, draws society into the trap of thinking that knowledge is
hygienic, pure, respectable, deodorized, produced by human heads and amassed in
stock….. [B]y making school compulsory, [people] are schooled to believe that the self-
taught individual is to be discriminated against; that learning and the growth of
cognitive capacity, require a process of consumption of services presented in an
industrial, a planned, a professional form;… that learning is a thing rather than an
activity. A thing that can be amassed and measured, the possession of which is a
measure of the productivity of the individual within the society. That is, of his social
value. (quoted by Gajardo 1994: 715)

Learning becomes a commodity, ‘and like any commodity that is marketed, it

becomes scarce’ (Illich 1975: 73). Furthermore, and echoing Marx, Ivan Illich
notes the way in which such scarcity is obscured by the different forms that
education takes. This is a similar critique to that mounted by Fromm (1979) of
the tendency in modern industrial societies to orient toward a ‘having mode’ –
where people focus upon, and organize around the possession of material
objects. They, thus, approach learning as a form of acquisition. Knowledge
become a possession to be exploited rather than an aspect of being in the
world.

The principle of counterproductivity. Finger and Asún (2001: 11)

describe this as ‘probably Illich’s most original contribution’.
Counterproductivity is the means by which a fundamentally beneficial process
or arrangement is turned into a negative one. ‘Once it reaches a certain
threshold, the process of institutionalization becomes counterproductive’ (op.
cit.). It is an idea that Ivan Illich applies to different contexts. For example,
with respect to travel he argues that beyond a critical speed, ‘no one can save
time without forcing another to lose it…[and] motorized vehicles create the
remoteness which they alone can shrink’ (1974: 42).
The lines of this critique and argument with respect to schooling when set out
like this are reasonably clear. But Ivan Illich in his earlier writings tended to
‘obscure the essential elements’ (Lister 1976: 5). He is ‘an intellectual maverick
who deals in metaphors and allegories’ and those who did not read the related
works ‘were often confused as to what deschooling was all about’ (ibid.: 5-6). A
further problem was that, according to Gajardo (1994: 719), Ivan Illich’s
writings ‘were founded essentially on intuition, without any appreciable
reference to the results of socio-educational or learning research. His criticism
evolves in a theoretical vacuum’. Gajardo goes on to suggest that this may
explain the limited acceptance of his educational theories and proposals.
However, perhaps the most significant problem with the analysis is the extent
to which Illich’s critique ‘overrated the possibilities of schools, particularly
compared with the influence of families, television and advertising, and job
and housing structures’ (Lister 1976: 10-11). This was something that Ivan
Illich recognized himself when he was later to write of schools as being ‘too
easy targets’ (1976: 42). It may well be that the way in which he presented his
critique was taken as condemning the school out of hand (Gajardo 1994: 719).
However, as Finger and Asún 2001: 11) have commented,

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. 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.

It can be persuasively argued that Ivan Illich ‘transgressed a cardinal rule’

about what discourses are acceptable within education (Gabbard 1993). He
questioned the ‘messianic principle’ that schools as institutions can educate.

Ivan Illich’s critique remains deeply suggestive. While not rigorously linked to
data, nor fully located in its theoretical traditions, it does nevertheless draw
some important lines for exploration and interrogation; and provides us with
some means by which to make judgments about the impact of institutions and
experts. The dominance of the school and institutionalized education in our
thinking about learning has tended to obscure and undermine other everyday
or ‘vernacular’ forms. We have moved into a period when knowledge has
become more commodified (see, for example, Leadbeater’s 2000 discussion of
the knowledge economy).

Convivial alternatives
I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action
over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be
spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a
lifestyle which only allows to make and unmake, produce and consume – a style of life
which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of the
environment. The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a
life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies. (Illich 1973a: 57)

The word ‘convivial’ has an immediate appeal for many educators and
animateurs in that in everyday usage it looks to liveliness and being social
(enjoying people’s company). However, while bring concerned with individual
interaction, Ivan Illich was also interested in institutions and ‘tools’ – physical
devices, mental constructs and social forms. He argued for the creation of
convivial, rather than manipulative institutions and saw conviviality as
designating the opposite of industrial productivity.

Conviviality, Ivan Illich argued, involves ‘autonomous and creative intercourse

among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment’ (ibid.:
24). He sees this as being in ‘contrast with the conditioned response of
persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made
environment’. He continues:
I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence
and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is
reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy
the needs it creates among society’s members. (op. cit.)

In convivial institutions (and the societies they make up) modern technologies
serve ‘politically interrelated individuals rather than managers’. (Illich 1975:
12). Such institutions are characterized by ‘their vocation of service to society,
by spontaneous use of and voluntary participation in them by all members of
society (Gajardo 1994: 716). Ivan Illich (1975a) uses “convivial” as ‘a technical
term to designate a modern society of responsibly limited tools’. He applied
the term “convivial” to tools rather than to people, he said, in the hope of
forestalling confusion.
In many respects, Ivan Illich is echoing here the arguments of earlier writers
like Basil Yeaxlee who recognized the power of association and the importance
of local groups and networks in opening up and sustaining learning. However,
he takes this a stage further by explicitly advocating new forms of formal
educational institutions. He also recognizes that the character of other
institutions and arrangements need to be changed if the ‘radical monopoly’ of
schooling is to be overturned.

Learning webs – new formal educational institutions. InDeschooling

Society Ivan Illich argued that a good education system should have three
purposes: to provide all that want to learn with access to resources at any time
in their lives; make it possible for all who want to share knowledge etc. to find
those who want to learn it from them; and to create opportunities for those
who want to present an issue to the public to make their arguments known
(1973a: 78). He suggests that four (possibly even three, he says) distinct
channels or learning exchanges could facilitate this. These he calls educational
or learning webs.
Exhibit 1: Ivan Illich on learning webs

Educational resources are usually labelled according to educators curricular

goals. I propose to do the contrary, to label four different approaches which
enable the student to gain access to any educational resource which may help
him to define and achieve his own goals:

1. Reference services to educational objects – which facilitate access to

things or processes used for formal learning. Some of these things can be
reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rental agencies, laboratories and
showrooms like museums and theatres; others can be in daily use in factories,
airports or on farms, but made available to students as apprentices or on off-
hours.
2. Skill exchanges – which permit persons to list their skills, the conditions
under which they are willing to serve as models for others who want to learn
these skills, and the addresses at which they can be reached.
3. Peer-matching – a communications network which permits persons to
describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the hope of
finding a partner for the inquiry.
4. Reference services to educators-at-large – who can be listed in a
directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions of professionals,
paraprofessionals and freelances, along with conditions of access to their
services. Such educators… could be chosen by polling or consulting their
former clients. (Illich 1973a: 81)
Such an approach to educational provision found some enthusiastic
proponents within non-formal education (see, for example, the work of Paul
Fordham et. al.1979). More recently, such themes have appeared in a
somewhat sanitized form in some policy pronouncements aroundlifelong
learning and the so-called learning society. Writers like Leadbeater (2000:
112) rediscovered Ivan Illich and argued for a partially deschooled society:
‘More learning should be done at home, in offices and kitchens, in the contexts
where knowledge is deployed to solve problems and to add value to people’s
lives’. However, there can be a cost in this. The reference to ‘adding value’
hints at this. As Ivan Illich himself argued, ‘educators freed from the restraint
of schools could be much more effective and deadly conditioners’ (Illich 1975:
74). Without a full realization of the political and ethical dimensions of
conviviality, what can happen is not so much de-schooling but re-schooling.
The activities of daily life become more deeply penetrated by commodification
and the economic and social arrangements it entails. Learning becomes
branded (Klein 2001: 87-105) and our social and political processes
dominated by the requirements of corporations (Monboit 2001).
Informal education – changing the character of other institutions
and formations. Ivan Illich argues for changes to all institutions so that they
may be more convivial for learning.

A radical alternative to a schooled society requires not only new formal mechanisms for
the formal acquisition of skills and their educational use. A deschooled society implies a
new approach to incidental or informal education…. [W]e must find more ways to learn
and teach: the educational qualities of all institutions must increase again. (Illich 1973a:
29-30)

Unfortunately, Ivan Illich does not explore this in any depth – and it has been
up to those seeking to encourage more dialogical forms of everyday living to
develop an appreciation of what this might mean in practice for educators and
policymakers. Ivan Illich’s critique of development and his ‘call for the
creation of a radically new relationship between human beings and their
environment’ has not played a significant part in the mainstream of policy and
practice (Finger and Asún 2001: 14). In recent years one of the strongest
arguments for the need to examine the learning potential of institutions has
come from those like Peter Senge who have sought to alter the character of
business organizations (creating so-called ‘learning organizations‘). While
some of these writers have had a concern with dialogue and organizational
forms that are more just, many have not had the sorts of interests and
commitments that Ivan Illich described as ‘convivial’. In some respects the
current interest in social capital (most significantly expressed in the work
of Robert Putnam 2000) is more hopeful. The importance of convivial
institutions is recognized in the sustaining ofcommunity – but social capital,
because it is also linked to economic advancement, can be easily co-opted in
the service of non-convivial activities (as the involvement of the World Bank in
promoting the notion may suggest).

Conclusion

Ivan Illich’s concern for conviviality – on the ordering of education, work, and
society as a whole in line with human needs, and his call for the
‘deprofessionalization’ of social relations has provided an important set of
ideas upon which educators concerned with mutuality and sociality can draw.
His critique of the school and call for the deschooling of society hit a chord
with many workers and alternative educators. Further, Ivan Illich’s argument
for the development of educational webs or networks connected with an
interest in ‘non-formal’ approaches and with experiments in ‘free’ schooling.
Last, his interest in professionalization and the extent to which medical
interventions, for example, actually create illness has added to the critique of
professions and a concern to interrogate practice by informal educators –
especially those in more ‘community-oriented’ work. As Gajardo (1994: 717)
has commented, ‘if… we separate Illich’s thought from its emotional context, it
is interesting to realize how thought-provoking some of his suggestions and
proposals are’.

Erich Fromm, in his introduction to Celebration of Awareness (Illich 1973: 11)

describes Ivan Illich as follows:

The author is a man of rare courage, great aliveness, extraordinary erudition and
brilliance, and fertile imaginativeness, whose whole thinking is based on his concern for
man’s unfolding – physically, spiritually and intellectually. The importance of his
thoughts… lies in the fact that they have a liberating effect on the mind by showing new
possibilities; they make the reader more alive because they open the door that leads out
of the prison of routinized, sterile, preconceived notions.
Ivan Illich’s critique of the process of institutionalization in education and his
setting of this in the context of the desirability of more convivial relationships
retains considerable power. As Finger and Asún (2001: 14-15) have argued, the
‘forgotten Illich’ offers considerable potential for those wanting to build
educational forms that are more fully human, and communities that allow
people to flourish. For Illich, and for Finger and Asún (2001: 177), ‘De-
institutionalization constitutes the challenge for learning our way out’ of the
current malaise.