"School divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the simple fact that a school has been built to serve them"
About this Quote
Illich’s line lands like a calm accusation: modern schooling isn’t merely an engine of learning, it’s a social technology for storage. The first move is structural, almost demographic. By noting that school now carves life into “two segments… of comparable length,” he’s pointing to the quiet creep of institutional time. Childhood and early adulthood get annexed by classrooms, degrees, credentials, remediation, re-training. The curriculum is almost secondary; what matters is the normalization of being processed.
“Custodial care” is the knife. It drags schooling into the same moral neighborhood as asylums, prisons, and workhouses: places society builds to manage people it doesn’t know how to absorb. Illich isn’t claiming teachers are wardens; he’s indicting the system’s function. Once the building exists, it generates its own justification. A population becomes “declared undesirable elsewhere” not because it’s inherently dangerous or deficient, but because the institutional category has been created. The subtext is bureaucratic magic: create a box, then interpret human lives as fitting inside it.
Context matters. Illich is writing in the late-20th-century moment of expanding compulsory education and credentialism, when school becomes the default answer to unemployment, inequality, and youth unrest. His broader “deschooling” project attacks the monopoly schooling holds over legitimacy: knowledge counts if it’s certified; a person counts if they’re trackable. The quote works because it reframes a beloved civic ideal as an apparatus of exclusion disguised as care, and makes the reader feel how easily benevolence curdles into containment.
“Custodial care” is the knife. It drags schooling into the same moral neighborhood as asylums, prisons, and workhouses: places society builds to manage people it doesn’t know how to absorb. Illich isn’t claiming teachers are wardens; he’s indicting the system’s function. Once the building exists, it generates its own justification. A population becomes “declared undesirable elsewhere” not because it’s inherently dangerous or deficient, but because the institutional category has been created. The subtext is bureaucratic magic: create a box, then interpret human lives as fitting inside it.
Context matters. Illich is writing in the late-20th-century moment of expanding compulsory education and credentialism, when school becomes the default answer to unemployment, inequality, and youth unrest. His broader “deschooling” project attacks the monopoly schooling holds over legitimacy: knowledge counts if it’s certified; a person counts if they’re trackable. The quote works because it reframes a beloved civic ideal as an apparatus of exclusion disguised as care, and makes the reader feel how easily benevolence curdles into containment.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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