Friday 6 December 2013

Ivan Illich - Shaping The Consumer

'The poor have always been powerless. The increasing reliance on institutional care adds  a new dimension to their helplessness: psychological impotence, the inability to fend for themselves.'

'All over the world the school has an anti-educational effect on society.'

'If we do not challenge the assumption that valuable knowledge is a commodity which under certain circumstances may be forced onto the consumer, society will be increasingly dominated by sinister pseudo schools and totalitarian managers of information. Pedagogical therapists will drug their pupils more in order to teach them better, and students will drug themselves more to gain relief from the pressures of teachers and the race for certificates. Increasingly larger numbers of bureaucrats will presume to pose as teachers. The language of the school-man has already been co-opted by the ad-man. Now the general and the policeman try to dignify their professions by masquerading as educators. In a schooled society, war making and civil repression find an educational rationale.'

'As long as we are not aware of the ritual through which school shapes the progressive consumer - the economy's major resource - we cannot break the spell of this economy and shape a new one.'

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