Ivan Illich Deschooling Society.

Ivan Illich: Deschooling SocietyI had occassion to met him in a local book store. He was a teacher at Penn State. I knew who he was based on knowledge of his facial tumor. It was quite bad, but he would not have it removed. It had something to do with his "philosophical" positon about medical treatment. It eventually killed him. I just learned about it today. I liked what he had to say about education, educating onesself and one's friends. It seemed a good way to approach education. Of course, there were other (more subversive) ways as well. But, the man' heart seemed to be good.  I will miss knowing of his physical presence on Earth, but his spirit definitely remains---and it is strong. He sought excellence in everything he did.

.H.
      Macroinformation.org / Knatz / FLEX  10/14/1 
      (Transferred from Knatz.com)  

Bulletin
12/03/2002: Ivan Illich is dead.
PARIS (AFP) - Ivan Illich, pretre catholique devenu un specialiste des problemes educatifs, vient de deceder a Breme (Allemagne) a l'age de 76 ans, a-t-on appris mardi aupres de l'editeur Fayard, precisant qu'il souffrait depuis longtemps d'un cancer. 
Times Obituary 

        Ivan Illich 
      To deschool means to abolish the power of one person 
      to oblige another person to attend a meeting. 


      Deschooling Society 
      Chap. 6  


Make up your mind. If you're for coercion, then you can hardly disapprove of Stalin or Hitler. If you oppose coercion, then you're a deschooler. 

(If you're a deschooler, then how come you haven't supported the deschoolers?) 

In the 1960s Ivan Illich led a group of thinkers, arriving at the invention of networking as a solution to kleptocracy on the one hand and to technology on the other. We have the kleptocracy. We have the technology. Let's use the latter to undo the former. Render the global village tribal by a cheap sharing of information. 

The networking part came largely from the thinking of cyberneticist Heinz von Forrester: Map the community.   Ivan Illich was the first person to articulate this in a voice that reached the public both orally and in print. Illich's papers in NYR got my attention. Their publication as Deschooling Society achieved best-sellerdom. 

In applying Illich's design to my own founding of the Free Learning Exchange, Inc. in New York in 1971, I tried to expand the Illich think-tank points to describe my vision of interconnected local networks, a vision thinkers like Arthur C. Clarke, R. Buckminster Fuller, and Marshal McLuhan had long given me glimmerings of. 

      Map the community 
      And network the maps.  


I first noticed foreshadowings of the internet   in futurist stuff of 1960, 1961. Those foreshadowings were much clearer by 1970. I don't believe anyone, including Ivan Illich, made them clearer than I did in my FLEX correspondence and publications: 1970-1974 (the publications preceded the legal entity). 

Something happened. Illich's best seller was allowed to go out of print. New Illich books never got into print, at least not in the United States. Illich was invited on television to appear on television: the appearance never materialized. Why? Such cancellations happened behind closed doors. 

Denis Detzel's Evanston Learning Exchange got mentioned in the Congressional Record. My own best writings 1948-1970 had been 100% rejected, but my FLEX writings of 1970-1971 found early publicity very easily. Then all at once progress stopped, stopped dead. Time hired a guy to find me, rushed me into their offices, looked me over ... and rushed me back out: not one word reaching print. IBM took months to consider my requests for financing: then declined. How dare IBM now talk about networking? 

I walked around the campuses of Columbia and NYU shoving Illich and my own FLEX publications under the nose of every professor whose attention I could get for even a second. The professors neither registered their expertise with FLEX nor did the insititutions themselves turn over their administrations to me. I still hear the silent message: Paul, why should we share? we've already got the monopoly. Why should we allow information to become cheap? we've already made it so expensive. 

I don't believe even my wife understood what I was doing in those days. I don't believe even she understands today. I'm not sure even my son understands completely, and he's a genius too: smarter than me in several ways. Please: some future Mary Leakey. Find these footprints. See what they are. 



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I had increasingly disliked the line this file had devolved along: accumulating bric-a-brac over the years like a Victorian drawing room. I restart from scratch and suddenly I've elbowed myself to stage center: a different fault. I leave the descendant of the original file in this directory but rename it Ivan Illich. I'll delete materials as I'm satisfied that I've found better settings. If these files ever stop changing, then I got it right or I'm dead. 


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Rough simplification: Illich worked with a series of great people in the 1960s: Paul Goodman, Everet Reimer ... I call them his colleagues.   I call other great people he didn't work with who nevertheless preceded him, his predecessors:   Jesus of Nazareth, Malthus, Clarke ... Illich had still other great people working around him and for him: people without their own reputations at that time: Dennis Sullivan, Denis Detzel ... I call those people, numbering myself among them, his disciples. 
Denis Detzel in those days called Ivan Illich the DI.   DI as of course in Drill Instructor and DI of course as in Don Ivan!   If you do not recognize the connotations of the honorific "don" in Romance languages, then you are not worthy of that bit of information. 



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      FLEX  Illich file source  Cuckoo Internet  



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Search engines, assorted links, bring visitors (most welcome) into a particular file, sometimes to a particular section of a file, through the skylight as it were. The author invites you to also pay a visit through the front door: through either of my front doors: 

Knatz.com 
Macroinformation.org