evaltRe: Ivan Illich, RIP

[Rick Parkany <rparkany@BORG.COM>]

> Susan Ohanian wrote:
>
> I don't recall ever having seen such a mean-spirited obituary. What would have been fine in a book review just seems out of place here.
>
> susan
> http://www.susanohanian.org
>
> Ivan Illich, 76, Philosopher Who Challenged Status Quo, Is Dead

Yes, indeed, Susan: Death, the most ubiquitous aspect of Life, calls a dear one from us...

...I bring to your attention that his quite fine book, *Deshooling Society*, (that I always lend out
and never have home) is out of print, but in the public domain @ one of my alma maters:

A PROFILE OF IVAN ILLICH :
http://philosophy.la.psu.edu/illich/profile.html

E-text versions of: Tools for Conviviality & Deschooling Society:
http://philosophy.la.psu.edu/illich/books.html

> Susan Ohanian wrote:
>
> I don't recall ever having seen such a mean-spirited obituary. What would have been fine in a book
> review just seems out of place here.
>
> susan
> http://www.susanohanian.org
>
>
> 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."
>
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--
"Dein Wachstum sei feste und lache vor Lust!
Deines Herzens Trefflichkeit
Hat dir selbst das Feld bereit',
Auf dem du bluehen musst." JS Bach: Bauern Kantata
Richard A. Parkany: SUNY@Albany
Prometheus Educational Services
http://www.borg.com/~rparkany/
Upper Hudson & Mohawk Valleys; New York State, USA

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