Ivan Illich, ein Wissenschaftskritiker und Buchautor, der zwischen Mexiko und der Universität Bremen pendelt, wurde unter anderem durch seine - später revidierte - Forderung nach "Entschulung der Gesellschaft" bekannt. Ihm geht es vor allem darum, festgefahrene Erkenntnisse und Dogmen in einem Dialog zu hinterfragen.
M.R.
Self-Evident Educational Freedoms
Ivan Illich
1973
The level of education in any society can be gauged by the degree of effective access each of the members has to the facts and tools that - within the society - affects his life. We have seen that such access requires a radical denial of the right to secrecy of facts and complexity of tools on which contemporary technocracies found their privilege, which they, in turn, render immune by interpreting its use as a technological society imposes important constraints on the use to which scientific knowledge is put. In fact, a technological society that provides conditions for men to recuperate personally (and not institutionally) the sense of potency to learn and to produce, which gives mening to life, depends on restrictions that must be imposed on the technocrat who now controls both services and manufacture. Only an enlightened and powerful majority can impose such constraints.
If access to facts and use of tools constitute the two most obvious freedoms needed to provide educational opportunity, the ability to convoke peers to a meeting constitutes the one through which the learning by an individual is translated into political process - and political process, in turn, becomes conscious personal growth. Data and skills an individual might have acquired shape into exploratory, creative, open-ended, and personal meaning only when they are used in dialectic encounter. And this requires the guaranteed freedom for every individual to state, each day, the class of issue which he seeks to match - to make this bid known - and, within reason, to find the circumstnaces to meet with peers who join his class. The rights of free speech, free press, and free assembly have traditionally meant this freedom. Modern electronics, photo-offset, and computer techniques in principle have provided the hardware that can provide this freedom with a range undreamt of in the century of enlightenment. Unfortunately, the scientific know-how has been used mainly to increase the power and decrease the number of funnels through which the bureaucrats of education, politics, and infgormation channel their quick-frozen TV dinners. But the same technology could be used to make peer-matching, meeting, and printing as available as the private conversation over the telephone is now.
On the other hand, those whoe are both dispossessed and disabused of the dream
of joy via constantly increasing quanta of consumption need to define what constitutes
a desirable society. Only then can the inversion of institutional arrangement
here/drafted be put into effect - and with it a technological society that values
occupation, intensive work, and leisure over alienation through goods and services.
Schlußkapitel in:
Ivan Illich: After Deschooling, What? 1973
Writers' and Readers' Publishing Cooperative, London, 1974, Seite 21-22
Deutsche website mit Informationen zu Ivan Illich, seine Publikationen und
Veranstaltungen dazu: www.pudel-uni-bremen.de
Here you will find comments, essays and writings from the friends of Ivan Illich, and works of Illich himself. Because most of the ideas and texts resulted from converstions or collaborative work, we have not organized the material according to author, but according to theme or subject area.
You will also find a list of participants, which gives relevant bibliographical items, including both published books and articles.
Der verhältnismäßige Mensch
Ein "Trialog" mit kritischen Analysen zu "Lebenslanges
Lernen" zwischen Johannes Beck, Ivan Illich und Silja Samerski:
Zitate aus Ivan Illichs Beitrag: "Lebenslange Verratlosung":
"...Bisher schien mir das Geschwätz vom lebenslangen Lernen ein Unfug, ein Slogan, mit dem freigesetzte Lehrer die Umschulung ihrer Zukunft planen. Stellenabsicherung für ausgebildete Erzieher, die sich zu Architekten von Lerngelegenheiten mausern wollen. Lebenslängliches Lernen erschien mir als Propaganda für die unbegrenzte Anpassung von Menschen an eine beliebig veränderbare technogene Welt. Und das alleine schon ist eine groteske Anmaßung, ein ekelhaftes Unternehmen, dem sich aber ein besonnener Erwachsener mit Witz entziehen kann...
...Das unerschöpfliche Angebot von kompetitiven Lern-Paketen zementiert auch das Gefühl der Hilflosigkeit, der totalen Abhängigkeit von kompetenzvermittelnder Expertise. Beides, Abhängigkeit und Hilflosigkeit, vermittelte auch das Pflichtschulwesen, aber nur auf Zeit. Aber kein Schulwesen versprach das lebenslange update der individuellen compatibility mit der als operating system verstandenen technogenen Gesellschaft...
...Entweder läßt Du Dich verratlosen, und erwürfelst Dir ein Los und machst Dein "Ich" zum Würfel. Oder, Du entschließt Dich zu lachen, um Dich so entschlossen dem Phantom zu entziehen."
Volltext in Deutsch:
Beck, Johannes; Ivan Illich und Silja Samerski (1999): "Der verhältnismäßige Mensch". European Conference "Lifelong Learning - Inside and Outside Schools". 25. - 27.2.1999, University of Bremen.
http://www.pudel.uni-bremen.de/subjects/subject.html, Beck-Illich-Samerski-Lebenslanges
L.pdf,
In English:
Beck, Johannes; Ivan Illich und Silja Samerski (1999): "The Conditional Human"...
http://www.pudel.uni-bremen.de/subjects/subject.html, Beck-Illich-Samerski-lifelong
l.pdf
(Put in the internet by M. Reichl 01.09.2001)