Illich nicely summarized the left’s perennial program as “more jobs, equal pay for equal jobs, and more pay for every job.” For Illich, these demands were beside the point. He thought that, by and large, the goods, services, jobs, and rights on offer in every modern society were not worth a damn to begin with
He thought the educational system had no good reason to exist. It was, like every modern service industry, in the business of creating and defining the needs it purported to satisfy—in this case, the certification of experts—while discrediting alternative, usually traditional, methods of self-cultivation and self-care
Thus schools produce childhood, a phenomenon that is, Illich claimed, no more than a few centuries old but is now the universal rationale for imposing an array of requirements, educational and medical
Once young people have allowed their imaginations to be formed by curricular instruction, they are conditioned to institutional planning of every sort… . Neither ideological criticism nor social action can bring about a new society
What school teaches, first and last, is “the need to be taught.”
As production costs decrease in rich nations, there is an increasing concentration of both capital and labor in the vast enterprise of equipping man for disciplined consumption.”
Culture and entertainment were less abundant and variegated but more participatory. The (commercially convenient) idea that human needs and wants could expand without limit, that self-creation was an endless project, had not yet been discovered
more intractable was “cultural iatrogenesis”—the destruction of “the potential of people to deal with their human weakness, vulnerability, and uniqueness in a personal and autonomous way.”
when professional autonomy degenerates into a radical monopoly and people are rendered impotent to cope with their milieu,
When professional systems claim a radical monopoly over how people navigate life, the generation that inherits those systems may resist not out of irresponsibility but because the bargain no longer holds. The framing of that resistance as laziness or entitlement obscures the structural cause: the institutions themselves have hollowed out what they once offered.
