Illich's work is interesting. On schooling, medicine, and transportation, I think he gets at a fundamental problem, highlights a great partial solution for part of the population.
But Illich also generalizes too much and has a weird reactionary twist. (It makes perfect sense to me that he was the sort of person who would devote his life to the church but subsequently run into political issues with the church.)
Schooling:
Learning Webs are basically the internet with some tokens for video-conferencing a teacher once in a while. (Proposed in the 70's, no less!)
And it's a great solution for some people in some subjects.
But many students don't have the discipline or need extra hand-holding, and so on in at least one vital subject.
For every student in some subject who learns on their own and whose frustration with the system holds them back, there's at least one student in some subject who just won't learn the material without something resembling a traditional school environment.
And the weird reactionary twist: he sort of harkens back to the good old days while ignoring the fact that we used to just not bother educating most people, and also dismisses anything that's not explicit deschooling.
I remember hearing a recording of him basically telling a teacher that the only way they can truly educate well is by totally giving up on schooling.
I lost a lot of respect for Illich's prescriptions after hearing that, even if I still think he has a great eye for some problems and potential partial solutions. Because I lived in the age of the learning web and could see in my own life that excellent teachers could overcome a lot of the barriers in the system, and there were a lot of things I couldn't learn just from books/websites and friendly folks on IRC and forums.
Also, that poetic tangent at the end of Deschooling always made me cringe.
Medicine:
You could say Illich predicted the opioid epidemic and prescribed lifestyle changes decades before modern medicine caught up, but at the same time if every doctor and medical researcher followed his prescriptions oncology would be stuck in the 70's. And a lot of his work would fit right in among anti-vaccination folks.
I mean, 90% of healthfulness is about lifestyle issues, and medicine in recent history has done a really poor job of stressing that component of treatment. But Illich kind of hard lines about the other 10% in a way that's totally unreasonable.
Transportation: Another great example of a 90% solution that goes off the rails when Illich demands that extra 10%. I'm 100% on board with biking everywhere (and I even do so in the summer, although even then often exceept 15kph). But also, it's nice to travel to different states without going on a months-long pilgrimage...
Illich was very much a brilliant reaction to the more damaging trends that started in the 1950's to 1970's, but he fell in that "extreme ideology" pit that a lot of politics from that era also suffered from.
But Illich also generalizes too much and has a weird reactionary twist. (It makes perfect sense to me that he was the sort of person who would devote his life to the church but subsequently run into political issues with the church.)
Schooling:
Learning Webs are basically the internet with some tokens for video-conferencing a teacher once in a while. (Proposed in the 70's, no less!)
And it's a great solution for some people in some subjects.
But many students don't have the discipline or need extra hand-holding, and so on in at least one vital subject.
For every student in some subject who learns on their own and whose frustration with the system holds them back, there's at least one student in some subject who just won't learn the material without something resembling a traditional school environment.
And the weird reactionary twist: he sort of harkens back to the good old days while ignoring the fact that we used to just not bother educating most people, and also dismisses anything that's not explicit deschooling.
I remember hearing a recording of him basically telling a teacher that the only way they can truly educate well is by totally giving up on schooling.
I lost a lot of respect for Illich's prescriptions after hearing that, even if I still think he has a great eye for some problems and potential partial solutions. Because I lived in the age of the learning web and could see in my own life that excellent teachers could overcome a lot of the barriers in the system, and there were a lot of things I couldn't learn just from books/websites and friendly folks on IRC and forums.
Also, that poetic tangent at the end of Deschooling always made me cringe.
Medicine:
You could say Illich predicted the opioid epidemic and prescribed lifestyle changes decades before modern medicine caught up, but at the same time if every doctor and medical researcher followed his prescriptions oncology would be stuck in the 70's. And a lot of his work would fit right in among anti-vaccination folks.
I mean, 90% of healthfulness is about lifestyle issues, and medicine in recent history has done a really poor job of stressing that component of treatment. But Illich kind of hard lines about the other 10% in a way that's totally unreasonable.
Transportation: Another great example of a 90% solution that goes off the rails when Illich demands that extra 10%. I'm 100% on board with biking everywhere (and I even do so in the summer, although even then often exceept 15kph). But also, it's nice to travel to different states without going on a months-long pilgrimage...
Illich was very much a brilliant reaction to the more damaging trends that started in the 1950's to 1970's, but he fell in that "extreme ideology" pit that a lot of politics from that era also suffered from.